Program: PhD, History

Email: efeicht@luc.edu

Office: Crown Center 558

Faculty Advisors: Robert Bucholz and John Donoghue

I study the history of the body and of crime and punishment in the early English Atlantic World.  My proposed dissertation, "Remains to be Seen: Execution and Embodiment in the English Atlantic World" presents a series of case studies drawn from around the Atlantic, and seeks to understand how problems posed by the corporeal body were manifest in the body politic through execution.  My work spans seventeenth-century Virginia as early colonists struggled to survive in a new environment, the paradox presented by death in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the struggles of English society and government to re-make the body politic after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, to the Golden Age of Piracy and mass hangings in port cities around the Atlantic, and ending with London surgeons' efforts to secure the corpses of criminals before the Murder Act of 1752.  I am most interested in how each instance brought us closer to the conceptualization of the modern, disembodied self.