Carla Bittel 
Associate Professor of History | Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles , CA, UNITED STATES
Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts
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Biography
Carla Bittel is Associate Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University. She is a historian of nineteenth-century America, specializing in the history of medicine, science, and technology. Her research focuses on gender issues and she has written on the history of women’s health, women physicians, and the role of science in medicine. Bittel is the author of Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America, published with the University of North Carolina Press in 2009. She has published in the journals Centaurus and Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and contributed to the edited volume, Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine. Her research has been supported by several grants, including a Scholar’s Award from the National Science Foundation. Her current work examines the politics of gender and phrenology in antebellum America. She is also a co-organizer of the Working Group, “Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge,” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Education (3)
Cornell University : Ph.D., History, 2003
Cornell University: M.A., American History, 1999
University of California, Davis: B.A., 1995
Areas of Expertise (4)
Accomplishments (1)
Judith Lee Ridge Article Prize (professional)
Western Association of Women Historians, 2006.
Affiliations (1)
- Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Visiting Scholar, September-December 2016, and June 2-June 16, 2017
Links (4)
Research Grants (8)
Summer Stipends
National Endowment for the Humanities
Summer 2014
Anna K. and Mary E. Cunningham Research Residency
New York State Library
2013
Bellarmine Research Award
Loyola Marymount University
2012-2013
Summer Research Grant
Loyola Marymount University
Summer 2010
Scholars Award
National Science Foundation
September 2007-August 2008
Research Fellowship
Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History
2007
The Bellarmine College Fellowship
Loyola Marymount University
Spring 2007
Mayers Fellowship and Helen Bing Fellowship
The Huntington Library
January-May 2006
Courses (7)
Science, Nature & Society
Science, Nature & Society
The United States & the World
The United States & the World
Health and Disease in American Culture
Health and Disease in American Culture
Gender, Technology, and the Body
Gender, Technology, and the Body
History of Childhood and the Family
History of Childhood and the Family
The Civil War
The Civil War
Imagining Lincoln
Imagining Lincoln
Articles (4)
“Woman, Know Thyself: Producing and Using Phrenological Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Beyond the Academy: Histories of Gender and Knowledge, Christine von Oertzen, Maria Rentetzi, and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, eds. Centaurus 55 (May 2013): 104-130.
“A Literary Physician? The Paris Writings of Mary Putnam Jacobi” in Communicating Disease: Cultural Representations of American Medicine Carmen Birkle and Johanna Heil, eds. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013).
“Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Nineteenth-Century Politics of Women’s Health Research” in Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine Ellen More, Elizabeth Fee, and Manon Parry, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, December 2008), 23-51.
“Science, Suffrage, and Experimentation: Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Controversy Over Vivisection in Late Nineteenth-Century America” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79 (Winter 2005): 664-694.