The Politics of Rejuvenation in the Transatlantic World, 1890-1950

This research project examines the spread, appropriations, and meanings of ideas and practices of rejuvenation in the transatlantic world from the end of the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The desire to defeat the aging process and ultimately death can be traced back to any period in human history. Rejuvenation, however, propelled in part by utopian post-Enlightenment discourses of youth, became a powerful cultural and political imperative that promised to regenerate old, exhausted, and damaged bodies. The main goal of this project is to map recprocial relationships between rejuvenation schemes that focused on revitalizing individual bodies and those aimed at renewing collective bodies (nations, empires, international orders). It identifies the population sciences, organized youth movements, and the anti-aging industry as the three chief laboratories of modern rejuvenation, which also constitute the project's main empirical trajectories. Which forms of rejuvenation enjoyed a high degree of social acceptance under which historical circumstances? How can we explain that some forms expanded quite rapidly across political and geographical borders while others hardly spread at all? Which actors were able to tap into the political, economic, and cultural resources of rejuvenation? How did they do so, and at what cost to others? Where and when did rejuvenation projects encounter criticism or even resistance? In focusing on these questions, this project seeks to make an important contribution to three areas of historical scholarship: to a political history of the body that combines discursive, visual, and performative methods; to a history of age that defines "age" as a fluid and non-linear category of difference; and to a new transatlantic history that incorporates non-Eurocentric and postcolonial perspectives. I intend to publish the results of my research as an academic monograph with a prestigious English-language press to ensure greater international visibility.