Zoe Copeman's productive years abroad!
March 22, 2026
A steady clip of articles and talks (and dissertating!) keeps Zoe busy across the pond!
Zoe has had a productive couple of years while a pre-doctoral fellow at the Warburg Institute. She has published two articles on aspects of her forthcoming dissertation.
In each of these articles, Zoe evaluates the appropriation of Venus iconography within two separate twentieth-century health campaigns (anti-cancer and anti-corset wear), demonstrating the impact that aesthetic theories, gender politics, and the racialization of health would have on medical understandings of women’s body and their treatments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
“Making Cancer Awareness ‘Hot’: An Iconographical Analysis of Anti-Breast Cancer Campaigns in Modern United States,” Curare. Journal of Medical Anthropology 47, no. 1 (2024): 29-44 ; article for special issue: ‘Gender and Medicine’, edited by Barbara Wittmann (double-blind peer reviewed). https://curarejournal.org/ojs/index.php/cur/article/view/3835
“Memories of Whiteness: Greco-Roman Statuary and the New Medical Norm,” chapter in Memories of Antiquity, edited by Jakob Schneider, Madeleine Scherer and Benjamin Stevens (special issue for ‘Media and Cultural Memory’ series), Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2025. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111349930/html?srsltid=AfmBOop68FOCEuhhPSjuQ3y5SBQNSMyh6hPDA0zQ_uhUcPA1MOh2G00b
On March 18th Zoe and a fellow doctoral student at the Warburg Institute both shared 20-25 minute presentations on their dissertations. Her presentation disclosed her methodological framework for the main topic of my thesis: assessing a single surgical image across early modern medical print culture, and how the migration of this image shows how visual meaning was structured by genre, epistemology, and professional debates rather than mimetic representation alone.
Zoe brings it all back home (department-wise) when she defends her dissertation on May 1st!
Congratulations Zoe!