Ren Capucao

Ren Capucao is a registered nurse and the inaugural Mellon Race, Place, and Equity fellow at the School of Nursing, where he received his Ph.D. in Nursing with a research focus on the history of nursing and medicine, and completed graduate certificates in American studies and digital humanities. Capucao is also a “triple Hoo,” earning his bachelor’s in history and his master’s in nursing at the University of Virginia. 

He explores the transnational history of Filipino nurses through the critical lens of (dis)ability to illuminate and redress systems of oppression affecting the global nursing profession and health equity. His research examines how Filipino nurses’ capacities from the early 20th century onwards have remained suspended in becoming human under racial capitalism despite nursing’s history as a normative career path. It also considers these nurses’ life-making practices illegible to capitalist exploitation as ways to resist, survive, and reimagine the good life amidst the inescapability of hegemonic forces.

From 2018–2019, Capucao was the project director for a Virginia Humanities grant awarded to the Philippine Nurses Association of Virginia to create a public exhibition on the history of Filipino nurses in the Commonwealth. He was recently a 2022–2023 US Fulbright scholar at the University of the Philippines College of Nursing, where he co-authored Raising Standards, Saving Lives: The History of UP Nursing.