NADJA DURBACH portrait
  • Co-Editor, Journal of British Studies
  • Professor, History
  • Professor, History
801-581-7605

Research Keywords

  • vaccination
  • freak shows
  • food

Presentations

  • “’Indeterminate Sex,’ ‘Change of Sex,’ and the British Birth Certificate, 1921-1969,” North American Conference on British Studies. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 11/2023.
  • Comment on WWI panel at North American Conference on British Studies. Other, Presented, 11/2022.
  • Disability Studies and the History of the Victorian Freak Show, Disability Studies Seminar Series, Utah State University. Invited Talk/Keynote, Presented, 10/2021.
  • “Feeding ‘Growing Boys’ and Nourishing ‘Handy English Lads’: British Prison Diets and the Reclamation of the Juvenile Offender,” Gender & History Food and Sovereignty Symposium. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 06/2021.
  • Chair and Commentator, “Sour and Sweet,” Imperial Foodways: Culinary Economies and Provisioning Politics Workshop, University of California-Santa Barbara . Other, Presented, 05/2021.
  • “Public Health and Politics,” Roundtable Plenary, Phi Alpha Theta Conference, Utah State University. Conference Paper, Presented, 03/2021.
  • “Anti-vaccination in Historical Perspective,” invited lecture to class “Vaccines, Explained,” Duke University. Presentation, Presented, 03/2021.
  • Feeding ‘Growing Boys’ and Nourishing ‘Handy English Lads’: Prison Diets and the Reclamation of the Juvenile Offender, North American Conference on British Studies. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 11/2020.
  • “Keeping Kosher in the Camps: The British Government and the Feeding of Jewish Internees During the First World War,” North American Conference on British Studies, Vancouver, BC. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 11/2019.
  • Roundtable on Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst For Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, North American Conference on British Studies, Denver, CO. Conference Paper, Presented, 11/2017.
  • “’When the stomach presses against the spine, the heart may sometimes get displaced’: Cooked Food, Humanitarian Relief, and the Politics of Parenting During the late-Victorian Indian Famines,” North American Conference on British Studies, Denver, CO. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 11/2017.
  • “The Science of Selection: School Meals and Malnutrition in Interwar Britain,” Keynote Address, Food/Drink and the Articulation of Power and Agency at Regional, National, and Transnational Scales of Experience and Analysis Symposium, St. Andrews, Scotland. Invited Talk/Keynote, Presented, 10/2017.
  • “Nations Out of Nurseries, Empires into Bottles: The Global Politics of Welfare Orange Juice,” invited seminar presentation, Center for the Study of Work, Labor, & Democracy, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA. Invited Talk/Keynote, Presented, 10/2017.
  • “A Fraction of a Man: Dieting the Female Prisoner, 1843-1913,” Food History Seminar, Institute for Historical Research, London, UK. Invited Talk/Keynote, Presented, 05/2017.
  • “Tommy’s Tummy: National Tastes and the Provisioning of WWI Prisoners of War,” Plenary Address, Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, Victoria, BC. Invited Talk/Keynote, Presented, 03/2017.
  • “Nations Out of Nurseries, Empires into Bottles: The Global Politics of Welfare Orange Juice,” North American Conference on British Studies, Little Rock, AR. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 11/2015.
  • “From Communal Feeding Centre to British Restaurant: Food and the State During WWII," North American Conference on British Studies. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 11/2014.
  • “The Politics of Roast Beef in the Early Victorian Workhouse,” North American Conference on British Studies, Montreal, PQ. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 11/2012.
  • "Agency and Able-bodiedness at the Victorian Freak Show" Congress for Curious People, Coney Island, NY. Conference Paper, Presented, 04/2010.
  • “’The Necropolitan Circus’: Body Worlds and the Victorian Freak Show,” Performing Science, Philadelphia, PA, July 2009. Conference Paper, Presented, 07/07/2009.

Grants, Contracts & Research Gifts

  • Many Mouths: State Feeding in Britain From the Workhouse to the Welfare State. PI: Nadja Durbach. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 07/2016 - 06/2017. Total project budget to date: $50,000.00

Languages

  • French, basic.

Geographical Regions of Interest

  • United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Publications

  • Nadja Durbach (2023). Our Medical Liberties. Lapham's Quarterly. Published, 08/2023.
  • Nadja Durbach (2023). The Growth of the State: Routledge Historical Resources: British Social History, 1750-1914. Routledge. Published, 01/2023.
  • Nadja Durbach (2023). Review of Rebecca Earle, Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato. Vol. 128. American Historical Review. Published, 01/2023.
  • Nadja Durbach (2022). Feeding ‘Growing Boys’ and Nourishing ‘Handy English Lads’: British Prison Diets and the Reclamation of the Male Juvenile Offender, 1895-1908. Gender & History. Vol. 34(3). Published, 10/2022.
  • Nadja Durbach (2022). Review of Elizabeth A. Williams, Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950. Isis. Published, 03/2022.
  • Nadja Durbach (2022). ’Why cant 2 brothers?’: World War I and Britain’s Deceased Brother’s Widow Act of 1921. Journal of Family History. Vol. 47(1). Published, 01/2022.
  • Nadja Durbach (2020). Troy Bickham, Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. (pp. 889-90). Vol. 59(4). Journal of British Studies. Published, 10/2020.
  • Nadja Durbach (2020). “Atypical Bodies: The Cultural Work of the Victorian Freak Show” in A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century . Bloomsbury. Published, 10/2020.
  • Nadja Durbach (2020). Keeping Kosher in the Camp: Feeding Interned British Jews During the First World War. Immigrants & Minorities. Vol. 38(1/2), 1-26. Published, 08/2020.
  • Nadja Durbach (2020). Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. (pp. 302-3). Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Published, 06/2020.
  • Nadja Durbach (2020). Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain From the Workhouse to the Welfare State. Cambridge University Press. Published, 03/2020.
  • Nadja Durbach (2020). “Dead or Alive?: Stillbirth Registration, Premature Babies, and the Definition of Life in England and Wales, 1836-1960” . Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Vol. 94(1), 64-90. Published, 03/2020.
  • Nadja Durbach (2019). “Comforts, Clubs, and the Casino: Food and the Perpetuation of the British Class System in First World War Civilian Internment Camps”. Journal of Social History. Vol. 52(3). Published, 12/2019.
  • Nadja Durbach (2019). “The Growth of the State”: Routledge Historical Resources: British Social History, 1750-1914. Routledge. Accepted, 11/2019.
  • Nadja Durbach (2018). “The Parcel is Political: The British Government and the Regulation of Food Parcels for Prisoners of War, 1914-1918” . First World War Studies. Vol. 9(1). Published, 12/2018.
  • Nadja Durbach (2018). “One British Thing: A Bottle of Welfare Orange Juice, c. 1961-71”. Journal of British Studies. Vol. 57(3). Published, 10/2018.
  • Nadja Durbach & Joyce Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes (eds.), (2018). “Atypical Bodies: The Cultural Work of the Victorian Freak Show”. A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury Press). Accepted, 07/2018.
  • Nadja Durbach (2017). “British Restaurants and the Gender Politics of the Wartime Midday Meal". Sandra Dawson and Mark Crowley (eds.), Home Fronts: Britain and the Empire at War (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer). Published, 06/2017.
  • Seth Koven, The Matchgirl and the Heiress. American Historical Review 120(5) 2015. Published, 12/2015.
  • Elizabeth T. Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834-1929. Victorian Studies 57(1) 2014. Published, 10/2014.
  • “Private Lives, Public Records: Illegitimacy and the Birth Certificate in Twentieth-Century Britain,” Twentieth Century British History, 25(2) (2014) (doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwt023). Published, 06/2014.
  • “Skinless Wonders: Body Worlds and the Victorian Freak Show” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, published online June 2012 (doi: 10.1093/jhmas/jrs035); published hard copy 69(1) January, 2014. Published, 01/2014.
  • “Roast Beef, the New Poor Law, and the British Nation, 1834-1863” Journal of British Studies 52(4) 2013. Published, 10/2013.
  • “1847: ‘freak of nature’ enters common parlance” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, online 2012. Published, 04/2012.
  • Elizabeth Stephens, Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present. Isis 103(2) 2012. Published, 02/2012.
  • Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, published and released October 2009 (©2010). Published, 10/2009.
  • Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907. Duke University Press, 2005. Published, 10/2005.