Kolloquium: No Country for Old Age: Rejuvenation in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2018 colloquium:

Mischa Honeck, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

No Country for Old Age: Rejuvenation in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

The desire to conquer old age is as old as humanity itself, yet the pursuit of youthfulness acquired a fiercer urgency in the first decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on examples from the fields of population science, organized youth, and cosmetics, the talk explores how Americans of various orientations joined a sprawling transnational conversation about the social, cultural, and political promises (and perils) of rejuvenation. Moving beyond the standard focus on developments in anti-aging medicine, Mischa Honeck argues, allows us to chart the multiplicity of spaces and networks where rejuvenation figured as a frequently unspoken yet powerful concern.

Mischa Honeck is Senior Lecturer in History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is the author of Our Frontier is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (Cornell University Press, 2018); We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (University of Georgia Press, 2011); and coeditor of War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2018).