Dr Claudia Stein

Contact Information

Room: H312
Telephone: 02476 5 23428
Email: Claudia.Stein@warwick.ac.uk

Office hours: Tuesdays 12-1 pm

Academic Profile	Research
Undergraduate and Postgraduate Modules	Recent Conference/Workshop Organisation and Public Engagement Events
Selected Publications	Recent and Current Research Topics Supervised (PhD, MA)

Academic Profile

Director, Centre for the History of Medicine, 2010-
Associate Professor, History Department, University of Warwick, 2009-
Wellcome Trust Lecturer, History Department, University of Warwick, 2003-2008
Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow, History Department, University of Warwick, 2001-2002
Dr. Phil., University of Stuttgart, 2000
Magistra Artium (M.A.), Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Bonn, 1996

Research

In my current project Breeding for Bavaria: Bodies, Politics and Populations in Enlightened Germany I move away from my earlier interest in the socio-cultural construction of early modern diseases to the political and medical world of eighteenth-century Bavaria. I am particularly interested in the medical reform program initiated by the country's protomedicus Johann Anton von Wolter (1711-1789) during the reign of the Elector Maximilian III Joseph (1745-1777). Von Wolter's personal life and medical reforms not only allow fascinating insights into the development of medicine and science during the so-called Catholic Enlightenment. Moreover, following Michel Foucault's work on governmentality, von Wolter's activities reflect the increasing concern of the Bavarian government with the protection and fostering of the physical life of its individuals and the population as a whole. As in many other eighteenth-century European states in Bavaria too, the ‘body’ of the individual and the ‘body’ of the population became relevant factors for economic management. High profile bureaucrats such as Anton von Wolter saw the necessity to organize them around an apparatus that would ensure not only their subjection but also the constant increase of their utility. This new emergering technology of power, of which von Wolter was one of key architects, Foucault coined ‘biopower’. It is due to this increasing importance of health and longevity to Bavarian governance that medicine as a general technique of health and its administrative realization through physicians such as von Wolter, the so-called ‘medicinische Polizei’ (medical police), assumed an increasingly important place in the Bavarian administrative system.

I am interested in both the theoretical approaches of medical policing through which eighteenth-century governing bodies in Bavaria tried to produce the subjects best suited to fulfill their policies AND the emergence of new organized medical practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which the subjects were governed and governed themselves. It investigates key areas of eighteenth-century-medical concern both regarding the centre of ‘sovereign power’, the electorial court in Munich, and the wider Bavarian territory. One of its central claims is that in the case of Bavaria, the new strategies of the biopower were ‘born’ right at the centre of ‘sovereign power’, the Munich court itself and are intrinsically linked to the ‘reproductive drama’ that dominated Bavarian politics in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Although my main interest continues to be the world of early modern medicine and science, I developed a strong interest in visual culture due to my second project which takes me right into the twentieth century. Together with Roger Cooter (Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine, UCL) I am currently working on the visualisation practices of late 19th-and 20th century public health in Germany and Britain. Our particular focus in our joint monograph Biopolitics and the Politic of the Visual: German and British Projects on the 'Century of the Eye' is the history of the public health poster in both countries.

Undergraduate and Postgraduate Modules

Recent Conference/Workshop Organisation and Public Engagement Events

28-29 May, 2011 Inside the Irish Giant: History, Science and Art: Theatre event and Public Discussion, University of Warwick
18 May, 2011 ‘Writing Wrongs: The Politics, Art and Ethics of Writing about Injustice’ (interdisciplinary workshop organised with Dr Andrew Williams (Law School); Professor Maureen Freely (English Department), and Dr Silvija Jestrovic (Theatre Studies), Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), University of Warwick
2011: 27 April ‘IAS Speculative Lunch’; presentation of new research network ‘Being Human: Medicine and the Human Sciences’, Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), University of Warwick
2-3 June, 2010 The Making of Early Modern Scientific Knowledge: Objects, Spaces, Practices and Epistemologies (with Dr Elaine Leong and Dr Marie Thebaud-Sorger
23-27 November 2009 Sexual Health Awareness Week (SHAW), University of Warwick
7--11 July, 2008 Warwick University's First Summer School ‘Medicine and the New Media’, University of Warwick

Selected Publications

Monographs

Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany (Ashgate, 2009)
Die Behandlung der Franzosenkrankheit in der Fruehen Neuzeit am Beispiel Augsburgs (Steiner, 2003)

Recent Articles

The Birth of Biopower in Eighteenth-Century Germany', Medical History 55 (2011): 331-337 (in press)
Visual Objects and Universal Meanings: AIDS Posters and the Politics of Globalization and History’, Medical History, 55,1 (2011): 85-108 (with Roger Cooter)
Positioning the Image of Aids’, Endeavour, 34, (2010): 12-15 (with Roger Cooter)
‘Insights on Sight, History Workshop Journal 69, 1 (2010): 245-253
Cracking Biopower’, History of the Human Sciences, 23 (2010): 109-28 (with Roger Cooter)
Visual Imagery and Epidemics in the Twentieth Century,’ in David Serlin (ed), Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 169-192 (with Roger Cooter)
Protect Yourself’ in Public Health Campaigns: Getting the Message Across (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2009), pp. 66-88 (with Roger Cooter)
Coming into Focus: Posters, Power, and Visual Culture in the History of Medicine’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 42 (2007): 180-209 (with Roger Cooter)
Johann Anton von Wolter (1711-1778): A Bavarian Court Physician between Aufklärung and Reform’, in Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe, ed. by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Ashgate, 2007), pp. 173-193
The Meaning of Signs: Diagnosing the French Pox in Early Modern Augsburg’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 80, 4 (2006): 617-647

Recent and Current Research Topics Supervised (PhD, MA)

I am happy to supervise postgraduate research topics concerned with early modern medicine and science. Additionally, I am interested in supervising projects related to the history of medicine and visual cultury, history of epidemics, history of disease, public health, and historiography. Here are some of the topics and PhD student I have supervised or currently supervise and co-supervise:

Gaby Robilliard, Midwivery in Early Modern Leipzig (completed 2011)

Harriet Palfreyman, Visualizing Venereal Disease in London, c.1780 – 1860

David Beck, Thoroughly English: County Natural History in England, c. 1660-1720

Greg Wells, Shakespeare’s Doctor: John Hall’s Little Book of Cures

Anne Moeller, The Economics of Philanthropy: Halle Pietism and the Medical Trade to India
Anna Bosanquet, Creating Knowledge, Evolving Practice: Eighteenth-Century Midwifery in Britain