Dr Christina Benninghaus

christina benninghaus2 1 004d92ba4d92ba
Pat Thompson DAAD Fellow in Modern History
Wadham College
christina.benninghaus@history.ox.ac.uk

Christina Benninghaus joined Wadham as Pat Thompson DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) Fellow by special election and Tutor in Modern History in September 2017.

She studied history and philosophy at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She graduated from the University of Warwick and did her PhD at the European University Institute at Florence.  She taught at the Universities of Halle-Wittenberg, Bielefeld, Bochum and Gießen. From 2012-2014, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge.

Wadham College

Research

Christina is an expert in 19th and 20th century social and cultural history. Her research has focused on the history of youth, generations and gender, family and reproduction. Studying past experiences of infertility proved impossible without venturing into the history of science and medicine. More recently, she has developed an interest in media history. In her current research, she asks how images of the body, which by the end of the 19th century circulated widely even among the working classes, informed perceptions of bodies and of reproduction. 

Selected Publications

Modern infertility, in: Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming and Lauren Kassel, ed., Reproduction: From Antiquity to the Present Day, Cambridge: Cambridge University press (forthcoming).

Silences: Coping with Infertility in 19th century Germany, in: Gayle Davis and Tracey Loughran, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives, Basingstoke 2017, pp.  99-122.

Benninghaus, C., (2014). ‘No, Thank You, Mr Stork!’: Voluntary Childlessness in Weimar and Contemporary Germany, in: Studies in the Maternal., 6, 1, pp. 1–36.

Beyond constructivism? Gender, medicine, and the early history of sperm testing, Germany 1870-1900, in: Gender & History, 24, 3, November 2012, pp. 647-676.

Great expectations – German debates about artificial insemination in humans around 1912, in: Studies in the History of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 38, 2007, 2, pp. 374-392.

In Their Own Words: Girls’ Representations of Growing Up in Germany in the 1920s, in: Mary Jo Maynes/Birgitte Soland und Christina Benninghaus, ed., Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750-1960, Bloomington 2004, pp. 135-154.

Social Structure in the Twentieth Century, in: Sheilagh Olgivie, ed., Germany: A Social and Economic History, Volume 3: Since 1800, London 2003, pp. 279-319. (co-authored with Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jörg Requate).

Mothers' Toil and Daughters' Leisure: Working-class Girls and Time in the 1920s, in: History Workshop Journal, 50, 2000, pp. 45-72.