KU News Release

KU professor to lecture on relationship between masculinity, obesity

LAWRENCE — An expert on the cultural history of gender, sexuality and the body will use classic Hollywood thrillers to explore the relationship between masculinity and obesity in American culture from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Christopher Forth, the Jack and Shirley Howard Teaching Professor of Humanities and Western Civilization at the University of Kansas, will present his inaugural lecture, “ ‘Nobody Loves a Fat Man’: Masculinity and Obesity in the Film Noir Cycle,” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 29, at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

Forth earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Before coming to KU, he taught for 10 years at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he received university and national teaching awards. He has authored or edited seven books and published numerous journal articles and book chapters. Among his books are “Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France” (2001), “The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood” (2004) and “Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion and Fat in the Modern World” (2005). Forth’s most recent book is “Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body” (2008).

The lecture is sponsored by the Humanities and Western Civilization Program and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

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