I am a first year PhD student and Digital History Fellow at George Mason University. I recieved my masters degree from California State University San Marcos in 2013. I am interested in U.S. women's physical culture and ideas about the body in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
My masters thesis was titled "Madame Sylvia of Hollywod and Physical Culture, 1920-1940". It looked at Sylvia Ullback who was beauty expert to the stars in the 1920s and a columnist on beauty and physical culture for Photoplay magazine in the 1930s. She wrote several best selling books and was the authority on women's beauty during the Great Depression. The thesis examines the connection between Hollywood and physical culture as well as the shifts in ideas about the female body from 1920-1940.