PhD Student
North America
Emily Martin is a fourth year PhD candidate interested in the history of medicine, racial susceptibility, and diet in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States.
Her dissertation explains how American public health at the turn of the twentieth century looked to food and diet to rationalize and exercise control over disease, ensuring that the cause and spread of the disease was linked to undesirable groups with undesirable diets. She uses a series of five case studies on diet and disease in US history between 1830 and 1930 to tell a story of surprising continuity in the history of medicine, demonstrating that food was widely used by public health officials dealing with different types of disease outbreaks to explain the link between certain races and certain diseases. Shes argues that racial suceptibility to disease was often articulated and mediated through cultural practices like diet and not simply through inborn or hereditary characteristics. The focus on diet and aliemntary practies also served to responisibilize groups facing disease outbreaks, allowing public health workers to mark groups with deviant alimentary practices as responsible for diseases they, in reality, only suffered from.
Her projects focuses on five key case studies representing different marginalized communities in geographically distinct parts of the United States—the 1832-1866 cholera epidemic, the 1900 plague outbreak in San Francisco, endemic tuberculosis on Native American reservations in the northern Great Plains, Typhus on the southwestern border, and pellagra among sharecropping communities in the American South.
She completed her B.A. with honors in history and classics at Wellesley College, and continues to dabble in studies of the ancient mediteranean and the reception of Galenic medicine in the 19th century United States. Her paper "'My Dear Miss Eddington’ Reader Letters and Early Twentieth Century Food Media," was the recipient of the 2021 Oxford Food Symposium Rising Scholar Award. She is one of the 2024-2025 History Graduate Association representatives and works as the History Department's Graduate Events assistant.
Research Interests
- Food history
- History of medicine
- History of Public Health
- Immigration history
- Science and technology studies
- Sociology of medicine
Fellowships and Awards
2022 Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion New Directions in Theology Grantee
2021 Oxford Food Symposium Rising Scholar
2021 Edna V. Moffett Fellow
Education
M.A., History, University of California, Berkeley, 2024.
B.A., summa cum laude with honors, History and Classics, Wellesley College, 2021