Higgins’ dissertation, Sex Education and the (Un)Making of Men in Nazi Germany, examines Nazi sex education and its impact on the coming-of-age process for young “Aryan” men living under the Third Reich. Her project takes the form of an (Un)Bildungsroman, an imaginative reworking of the traditional German coming-of-age novel. It traces the means by which young men were brought into Nazi society through entangled sexual discourses—of miscegenation, national regeneration, and conquest—while also considering how this process was linked to the progressive removal of sexualized Others from the nation. Through a dual exploration of becoming and unbecoming, Higgins aims to deconstruct the idealized figure of the “Aryan” man, and question how Nazism’s framing of sex as a biological, racial, spiritual, and civilizational imperative both responded to and produced acute anxieties about masculine identity and sexual power.
Advisor: Frances Tanzer
Education:
- B.A., History and Studio Art, Elmira College, 2018
- M.A., Masters in European History, Politics, and Society, Columbia University, 2019
Publications:
Fellowships:
- Rose Family PhD Fellowship, 2023 – 2025
- Summer Graduate Student Research Fellowship, Visiting Scholars Program, Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, 2024.
