AGI News

Alissa Bellotti, DAAD/AGI Research Fellow

Alissa Bellotti

University of Haifa

Dr. Alissa Bellotti is a DAAD/AICGS Research Fellow from August to October 2021. She is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Haifa in Israel where she is a member of the General History Department and the Haifa Center for German and European Studies (HCGES). She holds a PhD in History from Carnegie Mellon University. The focus of her research is postwar and contemporary histories of East and West Germany, especially the politics of transnational pop-cultural transfer and exchanges across the Iron Curtain. Her first project (PhD thesis) explored these issues through an analysis of the entangled politics of East and West German youth culture during the late Cold War.

At the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies Dr. Bellotti will research a new project analyzing transnational breast cancer patient advocacy movements. This comparative study will reconstruct the very different histories of breast cancer advocacy in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States and explain how patient activists have become a new force for political and social change. Ultimately, this research addresses how and why Western publics have shifted their trust from governments and their partner scientific institutions to interest groups representing smaller, identity-based slices of society.

The DAAD/AICGS Research Fellowship is supported by the DAAD with funds from the Federal Foreign Office.

AGI is pleased to welcome Alissa Bellotti as a DAAD/AGI Research Fellow from August to October 2021.

Dr. Bellotti is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Haifa in Israel where she is a member of the General History Department and the Haifa Center for German and European Studies (HCGES). She holds a PhD in History from Carnegie Mellon University. The focus of her research is postwar and contemporary histories of East and West Germany, especially the politics of transnational pop-cultural transfer and exchanges across the Iron Curtain. Her first project (PhD thesis) explored these issues through an analysis of the entangled politics of East and West German youth culture during the late Cold War.

At AGI, Dr. Bellotti will research a new project analyzing transnational breast cancer patient advocacy movements. This comparative study will reconstruct the very different histories of breast cancer advocacy in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States and explain how patient activists have become a new force for political and social change. Ultimately, this research addresses how and why Western publics have shifted their trust from governments and their partner scientific institutions to interest groups representing smaller, identity-based slices of society.

The DAAD/AGI Research Fellowship is supported by the DAAD with funds from the Federal Foreign Office.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the American-German Institute.