Kate Sorrels

I'm a Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. My main research interests at the moment are in modern European and North American history of medicine and horticulture. I enjoy collaborating with other academics and community members. I've worked with Holocaust museums and memorials on digital commemoration projects and I'm currently partnering with Cincinnati's Harriet Beecher Stowe House on a historic garden restoration initiative.

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).

Stowe Garden: History Grows Here

The  Stowe Garden project  is an initiative to restore the two-acre historic landscape around Cincinnati’s  Harriet Beecher Stowe House  as a vibrant, educational greenspace for the community. Located at a busy urban intersection, the property faces several challenges, including an outdoor classroom overlooking a gas station, an underused event space due to traffic noise, and a wooded area littered with detritus from demolished homes and years of illegal dumping. We will remove invasive species and reintroduce native ones, restoring the historic plant communities that would have grown in the area.

 A Digital Humanities Project built in ArcGIS StoryMaps 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 97, no. 1 (2023).

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.

with Markus Dederich, in Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture, co-edited with Linda Leskau and Tanja Nusser. Rochester: Camden House, 2022.

with Linda Leskau and Tanja Nusser, in Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture, Linda Leskau, et al., eds. Rochester: Camden House, 2022.

in Tom Ewing and Katherine Randall, eds., Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History. Blacksburg, VA: VT Publishing, 2018.

East European Jewish Affairs 47, no. 1 (2017): 62-84.

Austrian History Yearbook 46 (2015): 296-326.

transversal 3, No. 2 (2002): 3-18.

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.

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.

 Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture 

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 . 

Here's a link to  my current CV .

My biggest project has been converting my front lawn into a pocket prairie with native wildflowers and and grasses.