Kate Sorrels
historian and plant person
I'm a Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. My research interests are in modern European and North American history of medicine, disability, and the Jewish experience. I'm also involved in a number of digital and public humanities projects. I teach on the history of health and medicine, eugenics and Nazi medical abuses, scientific racism, and disability history, as well as several courses on the Holocaust and forced migration.
Current Projects
On the Spectrum: Refugees from Nazi Austria and the Politics of Disability and Belonging in the Britain and America.
My current research project is on the Camphill movement, a network of private, residential facilities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that was founded by Austrian refugee physicians in Scotland during WWII. Their network expanded into a movement that still exists today, with some 130 locations mostly in Europe and North America. Through Camphill I reconstruct the larger story of how refugees from the health professions in Nazi Germany and Austria transformed medical approaches to autism and other cognitive disabilities in 20th and 21st century Britain and North America. The book is based on archival work and oral histories in Austria, Britain, the United States, and Canada.
"What They Took with Them: The Jewish Home among Christian Converts.”
This chapter will be published in The Jewish Home: Dwelling on the Domestic, the Familial, and the Lived-In (Edited by Leora Auslander, Federica Francesconi, and Joshua Teplitsky, under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press).
Disability and Belonging:
Camphill and the debate over independent living for people with intellectual disabilities
In this digital humanities project built in ArcGIS StoryMaps, I offer an accessible introduction to the often complicated issues at hand in debates about what kinds of living arrangements are ideal for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
I focus on Camphill, an international network of residential communities were people with and without disabilities live together in extended-family style households and work together on the land and in the crafts.
Project URL: https://arcg.is/0CrCeH0
Peer reviewed in Reviews in Digital Humanities 4, no. 4, 2023, where Jennifer Guiliano writes,
[Sorrels] offers a compelling model of how digital mapping and narrative storytelling can transform academic scholarship into public scholarship.
Ohio Under COVID: Lessons from America’s Heartland in Crisis
University of Michigan Press, 2023
This volume details many aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic’s tragic impact in Ohio. Its chapters range from describing the politics and ethical considerations that were in play at various stages of Ohio’s public health response and its inexorable push and pull relationship with the government and other leadership. The book gives credit where (or when) credit is due but is also very frank in discussing Ohio’s failures, especially as the pandemic dragged on amid various levels of political and community backlash. It discusses, often in very personal terms, issues in access to medical care including abortion during the pandemic, bioethics and critical care, impacts on students especially those with limited formal education, impacts on those incarcerated, racial and access disparities, ableism, and the grief following loss during the pandemic. The book also puts the research and epidemiology of pandemics into perspective with a look at the historical significance of past infectious disease crises, like the 1918 flu pandemic, as well as modern approaches like spatial epidemiology. Lastly, the volume consistently gears its theses and essays specifically toward Ohio’s very unique experiences throughout the pandemic. It details the state’s failures, but also touts the good Ohio is capable of, especially in its early proactive and reasoned public health response led by the Governor’s Office, in its medical and research strides, and in the respected Dr. Amy Acton, whose interview closes the volume.
Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture
Camden House, 2022
Ableism remains the most socially acceptable form of intolerance, with pejoratives referencing disability—and intellectual disability in particular—remaining largely unquestioned among many. Yet the understanding, depiction, and representation of disability is also clearly in a process of transformation. This volume analyzes that transformation, taking a close look at attitudes toward disability in historical and contemporary German-speaking contexts. The volume begins with an overview of the emergence and growth of disability studies in German-speaking Europe against the background of the field’s emergence a decade or so earlier in the US and UK. The differences in timing, methodology, and research concentrations bring into focus how each cultural context has shaped the field of disability studies in its multiple and diverse approaches. Building on recent scholarship that uses a cultural studies approach, the volume’s three sections analyze disability and ability constructs in history, memory, and culture. The essays in the history section examine the emotions, morality, and power as they are negotiated on the individual level. Those in the memory section grapple with the origins of the Nazi persecution of people with disabilities, the fight for recognition of this genocide, and the politics of its commemoration. Finally, the culture section offers close readings of disability in literary and filmic texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Cosmopolitan Outsiders: Imperial Inclusion, National Exclusion, and the Pan-European Idea, 1900-1930
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
This book reconstructs the intellectual and social context of several influential proponents of European unity before and after the First World War. Through the lives and works of the well-known promoter of Pan-Europe, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, and his less wellknown predecessor, Alfred Hermann Fried, the book illuminates how transnational peace projects emerged from individuals who found themselves alienated from an increasingly nationalizing political climate within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the new nation states of the interwar period. A central theme of the book is the role of evolutionism and Social Darwinism in the nationalist movements of the period. Evolutionist metaphors dominated debates about the modern state and international relations and, rather than dismissing such thinking out of hand, the Jewish intellectuals featured in the book embraced it. They touted the role of cooperation in natural history and offered an interpretation of social evolutionism that could support multiculturalism. Their plans for European unity would come to fruition a generation later. Thus, as the book reveals, some of the most influential ideas on European culture and on the peaceful reorganization of an interconnected Europe emerged from Jewish milieus and as a result of Jewish predicaments.
Articles and Chapters
“The Origins of Camphill and the Legacy of the Asylum in Disability History.”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 97, no. 1 (2023).
“COVID’s First Wave in Ohio: National Trends and Local Realities.”
Second Author with Vanessa Carbonell et al., in Ohio under COVID: Lessons from America’s Heartland in Crisis, Sorrels, et al., eds. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
“Inclusion, Emotion, and Disability.”
with Markus Dederich, in Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture, co-edited with Linda Leskau and Tanja Nusser. Rochester: Camden House, 2022.
"Disability Studies in German-Speaking Europe, An Introduction.”
with Linda Leskau and Tanja Nusser, in Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture, Linda Leskau, et al., eds. Rochester: Camden House, 2022.
“Can Network Analysis Capture Connections across Medical Sects? An Examination of Allopathic and Alternative Disability Research in 20th Century Europe and the US.”
in Tom Ewing and Katherine Randall, eds., Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History. Blacksburg, VA: VT Publishing, 2018.
“Police Harassment and the Politicization of Jewish Youth in Interwar Bessarabia.”
East European Jewish Affairs 47, no. 1 (2017): 62-84.
“Pan-Europe’s Cosmopolitan Outsiders”
Austrian History Yearbook 46 (2015): 296-326.
“Ethnicity as Evidence of Subversion: National Stereotypes and the Secret Police Investigations of Jews in Interwar Bessarabia”
transversal 3, No. 2 (2002): 3-18.
Podcasts
In these two episodes of the Bostiber Podcast, I'm interviewed about the research for my current book project on Camphill's history, and about my experience growing up in a Camphill Community in Upstate New York.
Community Partnership
I work with the Ohio Holocaust & Genocide Memorial & Education Commission (OHGMEC) and Cincinnati's Nancy and David Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center (HHC) on several research and teaching projects, including a conference, guest lectures for HHC's teacher training program, and digital humanities projects on the experiences of Holocaust survivors in Cincinnati.
“Dis/ability in Germany, Yesterday and Today.”
Conference co-organized with Tanja Nusser and Linda Leskau (German Studies, UC) and Jodi Elowitz and Cori Silbernagel of Cincinnati's Holocaust and Humanity Center, September 26-27, 2019.
This volume was the culmination of the conference. The Memory section of the book, with chapters by Warren Rosenblum, Dagmar Herzog, and Lutz Kaelber, originated as panel and lecture at HHC.
Holocaust History and New Media
In this course, offered as a graduate seminar and as as an undergraduate Honors seminar, students work with Jodi Elowitz of OHGMEC and Cori Silbernagel of HHC to build websites on the experiences of local Holocaust survivors in ArcGIS StoryMaps. The websites use interactive maps, timelines, audio, images, and narrative to tell survivor's life stories and share their reflections on the Holocaust.
The StoryMaps Biographies are available here .
Curriculum Vitae
Here's a link to my current CV .
Plants
My biggest project has been converting my front lawn into a pocket prairie with native wildflowers and and grasses.
Here are a few of my favorite plants.