Victoria A. Harden

Victoria Angela Harden is an American medical historian who was the founding director of the Office of NIH History and the Stetten Museum at the National Institutes of Health. Most known for organizing conferences and publishing works on the history of HIV/AIDS, Harden also authored books on the history of the NIH and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. She is a past president of the Society for History in the Federal Government.

Education Harden completed a B.A. in American history at Emory University in 1966. She finished a M.A. at University of Florida in 1968. Harden earned a Ph.D. in American history at Emory University in 1983.

Career From 1984-1986 Harden was on the staff of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), researching and writing Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: History of a Twentieth-Century Disease (1990). It won the 1991 Henry Adams prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government for the best book published in 1990 about the history of the federal government. In 1989 and 1993 Harden organized conferences on the history of AIDS. The proceedings were published as AIDS and the Historian (1991) and AIDS and the Public Debate: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (1995). In June 2001, she launched a website commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the first publication about AIDS: In Their Own Words: NIH Researchers Recall the Early Years of AIDS.

Edited volumes

Journal articles