University of Kansas

Faculty Member, History

Other Affiliations: The University of Queensland, Centre for the History of European Discourses

Howard Chair of Humanities & Western Civilization and Professor of History

About

Christopher E. Forth is the Howard Chair of Humanities & Western Civilization and Professor of History at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching interests revolve around the cultural history of gender, sexuality, the body, and the senses (with an emphasis on modern France, Britain and America) as well as European intellectual and cultural history. Before taking up his current post he taught for ten years at the Australian National University.

As a cultural historian I am especially interested in how gender, sexuality, the body, and the senses are intertwined in a variety of social and cultural locations. In previous books I examined how gender and the body framed the French reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy around 1900, the social and political turmoil of the Dreyfus Affair, and the tensions between masculinity and modernity in the West since the 1700s. In addition to engaging with social constructionist views of the body, I am increasingly interested in exploring materiality from a situated phenomenological perspective.

My current project is a cultural history of “fat” in the West, which I conceptualize in terms of visuality (bodies that appear large and/or differently shaped), tactility (bodies that feel/seem “soft” and “flabby”) as well as materiality (bodies that call to mind the ambiguous qualities of “fatty” or “oily” substances). By examining the shifting relationship between these and other factors, this work probes the social construction of disgust and challenges claims that intolerance for fat is a strictly “modern” development.

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