Women have long made textiles to navigate identity and exercise agency at revolutionary moments in history. To consider the powerful potential of the textile arts, psychoanalytical theories elucidate the ways in which the distaff, and the fiber arts more generally, has historically been a symbol of female agency and autonomy. To frame this project and investigate the history of scholarship about artworks produced by medieval nuns, I employ a critical historiographic method to explore the use of the enigmatic German term “Nonnenarbeit,” literally “nuns’ work.” After establishing the larger context of the historical relationship between women and textiles, I analyze three specific case studies, instances in which nuns took up the needle and thread at pivotal moments in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. As expressions of their communal identity and agency in the wake of observant reform movements, nuns at Kloster Lüne stitched colorful klosterstich embroideries and Benedictines at St. Walburg in Eichstätt wove tapestries featuring the sisters and celebrating the history of the community. Birgittine nuns at Vadstena Abbey in southern Sweden gained metaphorical access to the Eucharist at the altar through embroidered silk altar frontlets and lavish reliquary containers, made in accordance with St. Birgitta of Sweden’s visionary new order. I apply postmodern theories such as Actor-Network Theory to leverage my interpretation of nuns’ networks at Kloster Lüne and St. Walburg, and Thing Theory to elucidate the materiality of the Birgittine embroideries. The technical proficiency of the textiles in my project has been well-established. Using critical theories and feminist methodologies, I add to the existing scholarship with an investigation into the revolutionary spirit of textile production in these women’s monasteries during the late Middle Ages.

The essay conducts a wide review of the existing modern scholarship on plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, during the second plague pandemic in the Islamicate Mediterranean. A historiographical approach was taken to analyze the terminology recorded in scholarly plague treatises across the timeline of the historical narrative, from the centuries before during and after the 1348 plague pandemic known as the Black Death. Focus is given to the medical and symptom-based terminology that was used by medieval scholars to describes plagues arrival, appearance, and effects. Modern authors writing about regions from Anatolia and the Ottoman lands in the eastern Mediterranean, to the Andalusian region in Spanish Granada have translated and discussed major medieval treatises by scholars who were contemporary to the disease epidemics and this essay explores the medieval terminology using modern scholarship. An analysis of the detailed modern plague scholarship in the eastern Islamicate Mediterranean explores the interpretations and discussions generated by the numerous sources who wrote historical and religious treatises on plague during the initial pandemic and subsequent epidemic events. In the western Islamicate Mediterranean a trio of detailed treatises describe the symptoms and treatments for an unprecedented pandemic, providing unparalleled descriptive confirmation of the presence of plague related mortality. This western record is limited, however, by its finite temporal range, as no plague treatise arise from the Islamicate scholars in the western Mediterranean kingdoms to describe the events before or after the famous 1348 pandemic. Between the kingdoms in the east and west is a wasteland in the medieval scholarship on plague, its plague experience largely explained only in comparison with the adjacent regions. With this background the essay will seek the patterns and notable features in scholarly terminology, in order to create a coherent picture of the plague experience across the Islamicate Mediterranean.

This paper analyzes the epidemiology of the disease 'hysteria', once thought to be a uniquely female disorder affecting a woman's physical and mental states. As early as Ancient Egypt, a woman's reproductive system was a topic of pointed interest, later leading to conclusions on how the womb may 'wander' and how the mental state of any woman with hysteria must be treated with care. The progression of its diagnosis builds upon collective opinion, culminating in modern stigmas and stereotypes. I will define the parameters that transformed female hysteria from Ancient Egyptian gynecology to the modern day taboos of female sexuality, all through the lens that a woman's biology is radically different and perhaps inferior to that of a man's. I will trace this tragic domino effect within Ancient Egyptian and Greek societies, introduce the sway of Christianity during the Middle Ages, extrapolate on the social expectations of the Victorian Era, and finally culminate with the lasting effects that this classification of hysteria had on both 20th and 21st century women. I will then include a discussion on how, due to historical assurances of the fragility of a woman, there is now an implicit assumption that women are subject to being overwhelmed by their emotions more so than men. I will mention social studies which analyze gender norms in modern Western society to provide context for the apparent struggles of women attempting to break glass ceilings in politics, science, the arts, literature, and the military and frequently failing due to the expectations of their sex. Following this, I will speak on how derogatory speech directed at women, through interpersonal communication and mass media, conditions future generations to generalize women as being nothing more than an inherently "delicate sex". I will then speak on an implicit association survey that I created and distributed to my peers to measure whether or not there is still a strong association between women and immaturity, childishness, and an emotionally unpredictable pattern of behavior. The stereotypic labeling of women as suffering from hysteria, or any offshoot of insanity, has stained the manner by which women as a sex are appraised. Consequently, it has forged a defensive need to "prove" self-worth in almost all professional arenas if women are to be taken seriously in male dominated fields. I believe that the classification and influence of hysteria played a critical role in shaping modern gender bias and normalizing demeaning treatment of women due to their allegedly inherent female traits. I will conclude through highlighting the efforts of female activist groups and the surge of women's marches in the fall of 2016 and early 2017. The response demanded by women's marches today preaches equality of the sexes and a chance to right the wrongs of their hysterical history.

Spongiform Encephalopathies are a rare family of degenerative brain diseases characterized by the accumulation of plaques and formation of tiny holes in the brain tissue making it look "spongy". Spongiform Encephalopathies have a relatively short history but their origins date back to a time long before they were recognized as a disease. It was not until the 1700s that the first record of their existence was made. In 1732 a shepherd in England noticed that some sheep in his flock had become itchy and were "scraping" themselves on nearby trees and fence posts; he reported it to the agricultural authorities of the time. As the symptoms seen in his sheep progressed they also developed problems walking and began to have seizures. Eventually their neurological symptoms progressed to an unmanageable level and they died. In 1794, over 50 years later, the Board of Agriculture in the UK termed this illness in sheep "the Rubbers". In the following years while coming in and out of mention in many flocks of sheep "the Rubbers" remained a disease of minimal consequence showing negligible ability to spread among sheep and having no precedence for jumping the species barrier and affecting humans. The first mention of "the Rubbers" as Scrapie was in 1853, and it is still the designation of the disease in sheep today.

There is no doubt that globalization has been a force in history , and especially in the past one hundred years. This is extremely evident in the implications of global epidemics. The global response to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) revealed tensions between nation states and international health organization such as the World Health Organization) collectively called "Global Health Governance"). The issue was sovereignty. SARS showed us that there was more state-centric resistance to the Post-Westphalian world than previously thought. Where infectious diseases are concerned, however, the eventual compliance of states with the WHO shows reluctant but tacit compliance with international intervention.

During the nineteenth century, children's physical health became a dominant theme in France and Great Britain, two of Europe's pediatric pioneers. This dissertation examines how British and French doctors, legislators, hospital administrators, and social reformers came to see the preservation of children's physical health as an object of national and international concern. Medical knowledge and practice shaped, and was shaped by, nineteenth-century child preservation activities in France and Great Britain, linking medicine, public health, and national public and private efforts to improve the health of nations, especially that of their future members. Children's hospitals played a significant role in this process by promoting child health; preventing and combating childhood diseases; fostering pediatric professionalization and specialization; and diffusing medical-based justifications for child welfare reforms in the second half of the century. This deeply contextualized tale of two hospitals, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London (1852) and Sainte-Eugénie in Paris (1855), traces a crescendo in the interest, provision, and advocacy for children's medical care over time: from foundling homes and dispensaries to specialized hospitals with convalescent branches and large outpatient clinics. As a comparative study of the medicalization of children's bodies between 1820 and 1890, this dissertation also investigates the transnational exchange of medical ideas, institutions, and practices pertaining to child health between France and Great Britain during a period of nation-building. Specialized pediatric institutions in Paris and London built upon and solidified local, national, and international interests in improving and preserving child health. Despite great differences in their hospital systems, French and British children's hospital administrators and doctors looked to one another as partners, models, and competitors. Nineteenth-century French and British concerns for national public health, and child health in particular, had important distinctions and parallels, but medical, institutional, and legislative developments related to these concerns were not isolated activities, but rather, tied to transnational communication, cooperation, and competition.

In 1890, the State of Nevada built the Stewart Indian School on a parcel of land three miles south of Carson City, Nevada, and then sold the campus to the federal government. The Stewart Indian School operated as the only non-reservation Indian boarding school in Nevada until 1980 when the federal government closed the campus. Faced with the challenge of assimilating Native peoples into Anglo society after the conclusion of the Indian wars and the confinement of Indian nations on reservations, the federal government created boarding schools. Policymakers believed that in one generation they could completely eliminate Indian culture by removing children from their homes and educating them in boarding schools. The history of the Stewart Indian School from 1890 to 1940 is the story of a dynamic and changing institution. Only Washoe, Northern Paiute, and Western Shoshone students attended Stewart for the first decade, but over the next forty years, children from over sixty tribal groups enrolled at the school. They arrived from three dozen reservations and 335 different hometowns across the West. During this period, Stewart evolved from a repressive and exploitive institution, into a school that embodied the reform agenda of the Indian New Deal in the 1930s. This dissertation uses archival and ethnographic material to explain how the federal government's agenda failed. Rather than destroying Native culture, Stewart students and Nevada's Indian communities used the skills taught at the school to their advantage and became tribal leaders during the 1930s. This dissertation explores the individual and collective bodies of Stewart students. The body is a social construction constantly being fashioned by the intersectional forces of race, class, and gender. Each chapter explores the different ways the Stewart Indian School and the federal government tried to transform the students' bodies through their physical appearance, the built environment, health education, vocational training, and extracurricular activities such as band and sports.

Natural history is, and was, dependent upon the collection of specimens. In the nineteenth century, American naturalists and institutions of natural history cultivated and maintained extensive collection networks comprised of numerous collectors that provided objects of natural history for study. Effective networks were collaborative in nature, with naturalists such as Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian trading their time and expertise for specimens. The incorporation of Darwinian and Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory into natural history in the middle of the century led to dramatic changes in the relationship between naturalists and collectors, as naturalists sought to reconcile their observations within the new evolutionary context. This dissertation uses the careers of collectors Robert Kennicott, Frank Stephens, Edward W. Nelson, E.A. Goldman, and Edmund Heller as case studies in order to evaluate how the changes in the theoretical framework of late nineteenth century natural history led to advances in field practice by assessing how naturalists trained their collectors to meet new demands within the field. Research focused on the correspondence between naturalists and collectors, along with the field notes and applicable publications by collectors. I argue that the changes in natural history necessitated naturalists training their collectors in the basics of biogeography - the study of geographic distribution of organisms, and systematics - the study of the diversity of life - leading to a collaborative relationship in which collectors played an active role in the formation of new biological knowledge. The project concludes that the changes in natural history with regard to theory and practice gradually necessitated a more professional cadre of collectors. Collectors became active agents in the formation of biological knowledge, and instrumental in the formation of a truly systematic natural history. As a result, collectors became de facto field naturalists, the forerunners of the field biologists that dominated the practice of natural history in the early and middle twentieth century.

In the preface to his 1852 Dictionary of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery, Spencer Thompson wrote: "But health will fail, either in old or young, and accidents will happen, in spite of the most careful precaution." With this concise statement, Thompson summarized the universal human desire to combat illness, injury, and hurt with action and knowledge. The more efficient ability to spread ideas and technology in nineteenth-century Britain led to increased production and use of home remedy books. Although women traditionally represented the agents of remedy and care within the domestic sphere (centuries prior to the nineteenth century), a struggle between the supposed inherent nurturing capabilities of womanhood and the professional medical realm occurred within the rhetoric of the home remedy genre during this period. Cultural mores allowed and pushed women to take up duties of nursing in the home, regardless of advice given by male physicians like Thomas John Graham, W.B. Kesteven, and Ralph Gooding. Despite remedy book physician-authors' attempts to dictate appropriate medical care in the home through the writing of home remedy books, British women read, interpreted, and used home remedy books in ways that undermined medical control.