Doctoral Student

Hannah received her B.A. from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2013, where she studied social change, oppression, performance, and German. Her work explores how "obesity" - as a cultural and medical category - (mis)shapes health decision making, and medical science and professional norms, and individuals' embodied experiences. In her first qualifying paper, Hannah shows how physicians engaged in boundary-work to defend their jurisdiction over obesity and discursively amputate "rogue" doctors from the profession during a public controversy over weight loss drugs. Currently, she is working on two projects: 1. Identifying how internalized fat stigma - even among people who are not considered overweight or obese - may affect individuals' cervical cancer screening choices and 2. Investigating how researchers and online communities discuss the role of obesity in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Her previous research includes work on weight loss campaigns, militia movement self-documentation on YouTube, post-WWII German memory and identity, and inequities in education.