Carolyn Taratko

I am broadly interested in the relationship between knowledge, society, and culture in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.  My work also explores how notions of scarcity and crisis were informed not only by material conditions, but also by scientific and intellectual currents. 

I am currently completing a dissertation entitled, “Feeding Germany: Food, Land, and the Social Question, 1871–1923,” which examines the intersection between knowledge, practice, and the natural world that structured thinking about food and diet. This project draws on archival work conducted in Berlin, Koblenz, Hanover, Dresden, Washington DC (USA), and Windhoek (Namibia). In it, I explore how the problem of an optimum diet was intimately linked to understanding the interacting scales of household, national, and global economies in modern Germany.

I have been a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the German Historical Institute in Washington DC. My research has been generously funded by the Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Council for European Studies and the Central European History Society.