Jasmine Lovey

Master of Arts / History UNIFR

photo

 jasmine.lovey@unifr.ch
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4368-1438

- History of the Swiss nineteenth century

- History of Health and Childhood

- History of single mothers

Biography

After a Bachelor's and Master's degree in History and Latin Language at the University of Fribourg, Jasmine Lovey is a PhD student in medical Humanities. Her work focuses on the history of medical practices on children during the nineteenth century in french-speaking Switzerland. Her PhD thesis is part of the SNSF project of Dr. Dr. Felix Rietmann: Raising a Well-Grown Child: Media and Material Cultures of Child Health in the Early Nineteenth Century.

Provisional title of the dissertation : Prévenir et soigner. Entre promotions et résistances aux soins médicaux des enfants au XIXe siècle en Suisse romande

Research and publications

  • Publications
    5 publications

    LOVEY Jasmine, Figures de la mère célibataire en Valais (1929-1970) : entre assistance publique, perceptions sociales et enjeux économiques , in Thierry Delessert, Chiara Boraschi, Nelly Valsangiacomo (dir.), Pauvres, immorales et contraintes. Les adversités des mères célibataires en Suisse (titre provisoire), Genève/Zurich : Seismo, collection Question de genre (en cours d’évaluation peer-review)
    Jasmine Lovey (2022) | Book chapter

    Feitknecht Regula, Lovey Jasmine, Vocational Training and Education in the Library and Information Professions in Switzerland: An Overview and Some Reflections , in Innovative Instruments for Community Development in Communication and Education
    Jasmine Lovey (2021) | Book chapter

  • Research projects

    Raising a Well-Grown Child: Media and Material Cultures of Child Health in the Early Nineteenth Century
    Status: Ongoing

    Start 01.06.2021
    End 31.05.2025
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet
    The project seeks to provide the first historical study of the impact of popular print media on understandings of health and illness in childhood in German speaking-Europe in the early 19th century. During that time, children moved into the focus of a rising commercial culture that included periodicals, playthings, and medico-pedagogical devices. This print and material culture of childhood has hardly been used as a source basis for the history of science and medicine. This is a considerable omission if we consider the importance of magazines for the emergence of the modern public sphere and their corresponding impact on social and cultural discourses. To address this gap in our historical understanding of modern science, medicine and childhood, my project combines medical and media historical approaches. It focuses on three main questions: What is the impact of magazines on concepts of health and illness in childhood in the early 19th century? What role did the popular discourse about child health play in the professionalization of pediatrics? And, how did it inform domestic, educational, and medical practices? The project is divided into three interrelated parts. The first part focuses on the analysis of magazines published in German-speaking Europe (primarily Prussia, Southern German States, and Northern Switzerland) between ca. 1800 and 1860. The periodical press during that period is heterogeneous, quickly changing, and still insufficiently explored. Part and parcel of the project will be to provide an overview of magazines pertaining to child health and child health education. Examples include print media providing an educated public with news about the sciences and the arts (e.g. Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände [1807-1865]), magazines for a mass popular audience (e.g. penny-magazines [since the 1830s]), and periodicals aiming at a scientific education of children (e.g. Des Knaben Lust und Lehr [1857-1866]). Attention will be paid to content, genre, and mode of address of articles, para-textual aspects (e.g. design, images), as well as context of production, distribution, and reception (authors, editors, publishers, readers). The aim of this first part is to map themes and topics of popular discussion, trace the historical development of discourses, and situate the magazines in a changing social and professional landscape. To master the considerable amount of source material, the exploration will draw on digital tools using the software NVivo. In a second step, the popular discourse about child health in magazines will be contextualized with a range of additional published textual sources, including advice books, educational materials, professional medical journals, and medical treatises. The main purpose of this second part is to trace the impact of popular discourse on medical professionalization and scientific debate. Finally, I will selectively draw on three types of additional archival sources to anchor the analysis in contemporary practices: collections of playthings and educational objects, documents from private families concerning child education, and practice journals of physicians. These last sets of sources will provide case studies for an assessment of domestic, educational, and medical practices. The project will result in a referential body of work on the history of child health in the German public sphere in the early nineteenth century. It will provide a major complementary perspective to institutional and professional histories of pediatrics, pedagogy, and child psychiatry, and offer new insights into the history of modern childhood. The study will also be of interest to media scholars, furnishing a major historical study of the still little explored magazine culture of the early 19th century.

Teaching and courses

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