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​Corinna Treitel​

​Corinna Treitel​


Chair and Professor of History
Affiliate Professor of Performing Arts
Affiliate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
William Eliot Smith Endowed Professor
PhD, Harvard University
MA, Indiana University
BA, Carleton College
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Contact info:

  • Email: ctreitel@wustl.edu
  • Phone: 314-935-5333
  • Office: Busch Hall 212 Busch Hall 113 (Chair's office)

Office hours:

  • By appointment
    Busch Hall 212
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Mailing address:

  • MSC 1062-107-114
    Washington University
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Professor Treitel studies German-speaking Europe since 1800. She teaches courses on European history, world history, and Health Humanities. 

Her research focuses on science, medicine, and popular culture. She has published on occultism and modernism; food, farming, and biopolitics; and health beliefs and behaviors. Her current research investigates the puzzle of health consciousness, that voice in your head telling you to brush your teeth, exercise, eat fresh fruits, and so on. How did it get there? Treitel’s book explores a group of movements—medical enlightenment, popular hygienic education, Lebensreform (life reform), health communication, and wellness—that worked hard over the past 200 years to put it there. Here is a recent interview about the project.

Treitel enjoys collaborative transdisciplinary work. In 2015, she helped introduce Medical Humanitiesto her university. Today, she co-leads an international group of Health Humanities scholars with Sari Altschuler (Northeastern University) and a Health Humanities Seminar with Christina Ramos (WashU).

Professor Treitel welcomes applications from graduate students in German and European history, and in the history of science and medicine. Please contact her directly.

Selected Publications

Books

Eating Nature in Modern Germany: Food, Agriculture, and Environment, c. 1870-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters

“The Healthy Child: Enlisting Hygienic Citizens in Interwar Germany,” Journal of Modern History (in press)

"German Health Narratives between Life Reform and Medical Enlightenment, 1890-1930," Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies (2023), 69-93

"Nutritional Modernity: The German Case," Osiris 35 (2020), 183-203

"The Wife as Family Physician: Making and Moving a Health Epistemology for Women," Social History of Medicine (2019), 1188-1210

"How Vegetarians, Naturopaths, Scientists, and Physicians Unmade the Protein Standard in Modern Germany" in Setting Nutritional Standards: Theory, Politics, Practices, ed. Elizabeth Neswald, David F. Smith, and Ulrike Thoms (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 52-73

"Artificial or Biological? Nature, Fertilizer, and the Origins of German Organic Agriculture" in New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture, eds. Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland (Cham: Springer, 2015), 183-203

"Nature and the Nazi Diet," Food and Foodways, 17 (2009): 1-20

"Max Rubner and the Biopolitics of Rational Nutrition," Central European History 41 (2008): 1-25

Edited Volumes

Frankenstein at 200: It's Alive!, Special Issue of The Common Reader 10 (Fall 2018)

Selected Blogs, Interviews, Podcasts

How To Be Healthy, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis (March 2025)

Vegetarianism was Part of Social Reformism, Interview with Julia Malitska for Baltic Worlds (June 2022)

"Triumph of the Till: The Organic Food Movement's Nazi Past," World Policy Journal (Summer 2018), 83-87

Eating Organic in Nazi Germany, Hold That Thought Podcast, Washington University in St. Louis (September 7, 2016)

Happy Birthday, Frankenstein!, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis (December 7, 2015)

Contagion! Back to the Past, Institute for Public Health, Washington University in St. Louis

Organic Origin Story, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis (April 23, 2015)

 

Fellowships and Honors

AAAS Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (2025-present)

Co-Leader with Sari Altschuler, Seminar on “Health Humanities,” Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University, May 2025

Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, Washington University in St. Louis, Spring 2025

Co-Leader with Talia dan-Cohen, Programmatic Grant on "Science in the Public Square," Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures, Washington University in St. Louis, 2022-2024

Co-Leader with Sari Altschuler, Exploratory Seminar on “Rethinking Health and the Humanities during / after COVID,” Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University, June 2022

National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award, 2011-2012

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship, Harvard University, 2004-2005

Courses

Health and Disease in World History

Modern Europe

The First World War

Modern European Women

Modern Germany

Nazi Germany

What is Medical Humanities?

The History of the Body

Frankenstein: Origins and Afterlives

Graduate Seminar in Modern European History

Graduate Examination Fields

Modern Germany / Central Europe 

Europe since 1750

History of the Body 

Medicine in World History