My dissertation investigates medical ethics and military practice in connection to the United States Public Health Service's experiments with sexually-transmitted infections in Guatemala during the 1940s. I move beyond studies that have analyzed this experiment in relationship to medical ethics governing medical research in the U.S. and international medical communities during this time period by seeking to understand ways that Guatemalans understood health, disease, the body, and ethics. My project also analyzes constructions of masculinity within the U.S. military and the reason that these experiments occurred during Guatemala's "revolution," when the government sought to promote a "spiritual socialism" among the nation's population.

Charles Fogelman, Geography

I am a human geographer who studies the relationships between people and land. I work in Lesotho, in Southern Africa. Lesotho is undergoing a significant land reform, sponsored by the U.S. government. I am interested in the laws, regulations and social relationships created and transformed by this project and the way in which they impact Basotho people's lives. My dissertation project focuses on two elements of the reform. First, I study the way gender relations are explicitly framed by the US's Development project and the consequences, both intended and unintended, of this framing. Second, I investigate the ways in which local authority over land is altered as power over land moves from customary authorities to locally elected officials and government bureaucrats.

This project explores the relationship between daily life and the legal system in sixteenth-century France and uses civil cases from Rouen to argue that ordinary people were active participants in the construction of legal culture and more importantly, that we cannot fully understand early modern law without due attention to civil law. It examines how people mobilized resources and how the legal system served as an intermediary in this process. In short, my project will not only provide more balance to our understanding of early modern law but will also, more importantly, enrich our understanding of the way ordinary people shaped the intersection of larger social, cultural, and political trends. Simply put, this study will broaden our understanding of daily life and the way people played strong roles in creating and disseminating the legal culture of their communities.