“The Negotiation of Pathology as a Public Spectacle”
Professional Background
Dr. Tamara Zwick received her PhD in European history from the University of California at Los Angles and was an assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida, Tampa, and a Visiting Affiliated Fellow at the Center for Jewish Cultures and Ideas of the Department of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati until coming to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the fall. A native English speaker, Professor Zwick also possesses language skills in German and French. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Professor Zwick conducted research on her project, “The Negotiation of Pathology as a Public Spectacle.”
Professor Zwick has published a number of articles, including, “A Private Repulsion toward Public Women in the Letters of Caspar von Voght and Germaine de Staël” in Kinship, Community, and Self: Culture and Society Since the Renaissance (Berghahn Books, 2014); “Zionism” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Wiley Blackwell Publishing, 2014); and “The Bat at the Ball: Bourgeois Culture as a Written Practice in the Letters of Magdalena Pauli to Johanna Sieveking, 1786-1824” in Challenging Separate Spheres: Female Bildung in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Germany (Peter Lang, 2007). She has also contributed her work to a wealth of conferences and talks, including, most recently, “T4 and the Body: Negotiating Pathologies,” at the University of Cincinnati in the Department of Judaic Studies on April 14, 2014, and “Mutter Sieveking and the Fossilization of Old Ideas” at the 37th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Denver, Colorado on October 3-6, 2013.
Fellowship Research
For her Norman Raab Foundation Fellowship at the Mandel Center, Professor Zwick examined a discrete group of so-called early victims of the Nazi genocide in order to trace precisely how mental and physical infirmity was defined and organized by a range German institutions before, during, and after the war. By examining Nazi medical practices through narrative and documentation, this study looks at the very popularity of the ideas that were elemental to the Nazi medical policies’ momentary implementation and links them to medical culture after the war.
Professor Tamara Zwick was in residence at the Mandel Center from September 1, 2016 to February 29, 2016.