About
Area of Interest
My dissertation, Tempting the Nation: Imperial Belonging and the Politics of Syphilis in Canada’s Great War, 1914-1920, uses controversies over the wartime treatment of venereal disease to interrogate the nature, scope, and limits of the British Empire. Specifically, it explores how the founding of Canadian military areas in the British Isles disrupted established patterns of governance by collapsing the distance between periphery and metropole. As British and Canadian administrators questioned one another’s authority over the prevention and treatment of venereal disease (VD) among soldiers and civilians, they helped give shape to an emerging sense of Canadian national identity as intra-imperial bonds came under strain. I narrate the rise of national identity and the breakdown of imperial hegemony through attention to how doctors and politicians alike blurred boundaries between medicine and morality in treatment protocols, bureaucratic practices, and political debate. Ultimately, my project grounds shifts in the body politic in a new history of public health.
