Sophie Grapentin

Sophie Grapentin is a Ph.D. student in the Yale Program in History of Science and Medicine. She is currently pursuing her interest in European military medicine through a project on transnational exchange in the field of facial surgery to examine how cooperation and competition shaped the developing specialty in the early twentieth century.

Unexpectedly, it was her undergraduate thesis on fashion history that set her on the path of studying the history of medicine, as she came across a photograph of a soldier dressed in a leather corset belt with complicated straps securing two artificial legs, in-between advertisements of fashionably dressed women in corsets. Captivated by the visual and practical parallels between the two subjects, Sophie turned her attention towards military medicine.

She is primarily interested in the history of medicine and the history of the body but maintains a soft spot for the history of fashion. She is passionate about and has engaged in various projects around early education, museum pedagogy and equal access.

Before joining Yale, Sophie received a B.A. in History (2020) from the University of Oxford and a M.Sc. in History (2022) from the University of Edinburgh, where she was awarded the Jeremiah Dalziel Prize for her master’s thesis on the role of touch in nurse-patient interactions between 1914 and 1918.