Kristen is excited about the end of the semester and looking forward to researching and writing over the summer.
Kristen turned in the first draft of the first chapter of her dissertation on Monday!
Kristen
MIT Press was really great to work with. Here is their description of our book: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalo
Kristen turned in the first draft of the first chapter of her dissertation on Monday!
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Graduate Student, History
Thesis Title: The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Volkskörper in Saxon Germany, 1900-1933
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Peter Fritzsche
Mark Micale |
About
I am an MD/PhD (History) Candidate, a practicing Christian, a sports fan, a some-time blues and swing dancer, and always interested in critical thinking and intelligent conversation.
Thesis: “This interdisciplinary study, which combines scientific and political history, uses a new concept of the "telescopic body" to explain how ideas about digestion and nutrition brought the politics of the _Volkskörper_ to the kitchen table of every German."
The purpose of my dissertation is to understand something about the relationship between “the individual” and “the social” in early-twentieth-century Germany. One novel way of approaching this fundamental, political issue is through the domain of public health, which at that time was charged with the perfection and maintenance of both individual Germans’ bodies and their social body, the _Volkskörper_ (literally “the people’s body”). The lens I will use to access Germans’ ideas about their individual and collective bodies is nutrition, because beliefs about food and digestion reveal underlying ideas about what is good and what is bad, about strength and vulnerability, about the parts and the whole. Sources include cookbooks, textbooks, traveling exhibitions, scientific journals, family budgets, women's magazines, and educational materials such as posters and films.
I have just returned from Germany, where I was researching my dissertation on a full DAAD travel grant for AY 2010-2011. In the fall semester I am TAing the writing-intensive sections of the survey course for the second half of European history (1660-present) while reading my research notes and refining my outline. In the spring I will begin writing. After I complete my PhD, I will return to the last two years of my medical education. I plan to take a residency in (developmental) pediatrics so that eventually I can practice medicine for kids with special needs and also teach the history of medicine to undergraduates and/or medical students.
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