Dr. Caroline Lieffers

Biography

Caroline Lieffers is an Assistant Professor of History, specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century social and cultural history. Her current research examines the history of disability and American imperialism, and she also hosts a podcast series for the Disability History Association. Caroline teaches classes on social and cultural history, the history of health and medicine, and US and global history, and she is also available to work with students on independent research and oral history projects.  

Research Interests

Caroline is currently working on two books based on her PhD dissertation (Yale University, expected 2020). The first examines disability on the Panama Canal, and the second looks at physical, cultural, and spiritual disability in the history of the Omaha Nation. She is also interested in questions of historical practice and methodology, such as how to write history that is accessible and inclusive, and how to use history to make change in the world. She is working with Mark Sandle and William Van Arragon on developing a book manuscript about history and hope.

Selected Publications

“Imperial Designs: Artificial Limbs on the Panama Canal,” in Modern Disability, ed. Bess Williamson Stiles and Elizabeth Guffey (forthcoming with Bloomsbury Press, 2020).

“Consuming Ability,” in Disability and the Victorians, ed. Iain Hutchinson, Jaipreet Virdi, and Martin Atherton (forthcoming with Manchester University Press, 2020).

“Empires of Play and Publicity in G.P. Putnam’s ‘Boys’ Books by Boys,’” Diplomatic History 43, no. 1 (2019): 31-56.

“The Garden, the Library, the Body, and the Table: Ways of Knowing Food in John Evelyn’s Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets,” Global Food History 4, no. 2 (2018): 112-29.

Caroline Lieffers and Aya Fujiwara [co-authors], “Exotic Eating: Japanese Food in A Social Departure,” in A Social Departure, by Sara Jeannette Duncan, ed. Linda Quirk, Canadian Critical Editions Series (Nepean: Borealis Press, 2018).

 “‘Itinerant manipulators and public benefactors’: Artificial Limb Patents, Medical Professionalism, and the Moral Economy in Antebellum America,” in Rethinking Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures, 1820-1939, ed. Claire L. Jones, 137-57 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

  “‘What about Ireland?’ Alison Barstow Murphy and the Making of a Child Author,” in Home and Away: The Place of the Child Author, ed. David Owen and Lesley Peterson, 168-85 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016).

“Cross-Writing from the Crosstrees: Travel, Authority, and Juvenile Self-Representation in Barbara Newhall Follett’s The Voyage of the Norman D.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Summer 2016): 158-81.

“Patents, profit and the public good: the case of a 19^th-century artificial limb manufacturer,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 188, no. 11 (9 August 2016): 824-5.

“‘A Wholesome Article of Food’: Rhetoric of Health and Nation in Canada’s Oleomargarine Debates, 1917-1924,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 32, no. 2 (2016): 337-62.

Caroline Lieffers and Jason C.S. Wong [co-authors], “Pig’s Liver Rice Crepes: A 1970s Dim Sum Ticket,” CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures 5, no. 1 (2014): 1-15.

“‘Every family might be its own Economical Housekeeping Company (Limited)’: Managing the Middle-Class Home in Nineteenth-Century England,” Women’s History Review 21 (2012): 447-71.

“‘The Present Time is Eminently Scientific’: The Science of Cookery in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Social History 45 (2012): 936-59.

“A ‘Canadian Bethesda’: Reading Banff as a Health Resort,” Past Imperfect 17 (2011): 1-35.