Event

Celebrating Kathy Peiss, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History, author of Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe (Oxford University Press), and in conversation with Peter Holquist, Ronald S. Lauder Endowned Term Associate Professor of History and celebrating The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1760-1860 by Alex Chase-Levenson, Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania in conversation with David S. Barnes, Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania.

Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at Penn, where she teaches courses on modern American cultural history and the history of American sexuality, women, and gender.  Her research has examined the history of working women; working-class and interracial sexuality; leisure, style, and popular culture; the beauty industry in the U.S. and abroad; and libraries, information, and American cultural policy during World War II.  She is particularly interested in the ways that culture shapes the everyday lives and popular beliefs of Americans across time.  Peiss is the author of Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986); Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (1998); and Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (2011), as well as numerous edited volumes and journal articles.

Alex Chase-Levenson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where his research and teaching focus on modern Britain and modern Europe.  His published work has addressed trade, travel, and disease in the nineteenth-century Mediterranean, Victorian spectacle, and perceptions of ancient time in nineteenth-century Britain and France.  Chase-Levenson received his PhD in history from Princeton University (2015), and has been the recipient of an IHR-Mellon fellowship and a Henry Fellowship to undertake research and study in the UK.

Peter Holquist's teaching and research focus upon the history of Russia and modern Europe. He is the author of Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Harvard, 2002) and the founder and editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.  His current project, By Right of War, explores the emergence of the international law of war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Specifically, it analyzes the role of imperial Russia in codifying and extending these "laws and customs of war," and examines to what extent European militaries, and particularly the Russian army, observed these norms in practice. 

David S. Barnes is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.  A specialist in the history of medicine and public health, he is the author of The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1995).  He is currently writing a history of the Lazaretto quarantine station (1801-1895) on the Delaware River outside Philadelphia—the oldest surviving quarantine station in the Western Hemisphere.