Bert Hansen papers

Bert Hansen, Professor Emeritus of History, Baruch College of CUNY, was born in Chicago. He is a historian of science and medicine whose career spans teaching, research, and collecting in the history of medicine and 20th-century gay male culture. He received a BA in chemistry from Columbia University in 1965 and a PhD in history from Princeton University in 1974. His academic appointments included SUNY–Binghamton (1974–79), the University of Toronto (1979–84), New York University (1985–88), and Baruch College of the City University of New York (1991–2015). Hansen held research fellowships at Harvard University (1978–79) and twice at the Institute for Advanced Study (1984–85, 1997). Hansen’s early scholarship focused on medieval and Renaissance science, followed by a shift during 1984–85 toward American medicine and public health of the 19th and 20th centuries, including the study of contemporary visual materials as evidence for public understandings of science and medicine. He is the author of “Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America”, 2009. Hansen has actively collected and donated materials related to medical history, gay activism, AIDS-era documentation, and gay male visual culture to multiple repositories, including Cornell University.