Awarded article: Stefan Hanß, “Hair, Emotions and Slavery in the Early Modern Habsburg Mediterranean,” History Workshop Journal 872 (2016): 160—87
Nomination Statement: Here is a fascinating and sophisticated study of the political and medical meanings of hair and its cutting and shaping in the early modern Mediterranean. It is based primarily on the published narratives of those men who returned from captivity and enslavement in Hapsburg or Ottoman empires. The barber emerges as an important trans-cultural ‘artisan of the body’. Both the close shearing of the newly captured and the fresh growth of the liberated turn out to have their ambiguities and perils, and the medical and gendered significance of hair styling more widely is shown to be a highly illuminating topic.