Sarah Tracy

Sarah Tracy's research focuses on the politics of nutrition, diet, and substance use in America, as they pertain to health and chronic disease from 1800 to the present. Her books include Alcoholism from Reconstruction to Prohibition (2005) Altering American Consciousness (2004), and Conversations With Food (2020). Tracy is completing a biography of nutritional physiologist and epidemiologist Ancel Keys (1904-2004).  Keys helped shape the Western diet by developing the K Ration during WWII; conducting starvation and rehabilitation experiments to guide postwar re-feeding efforts in Europe; pursuing global epidemiological studies of diet and heart health; and championing the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet in bestselling cookbooks.

Sarah Tracy teaches courses within the history and sociology of bioscience and medicine and within food studies. Her courses are designed to expand and deepen students' understandings of health, diet, disease, and healing in Western and global cultures. Tracy encourages students in her classes to consider the reciprocal relations between science and society—to see science and medicine as social enterprises influenced by and helping to shape local, national, and global politics, ethics, and values. Tracy also built and directs the OU Medical Humanities Program, now 23 years old, a collaborative effort with the College of Medicine. The program is a natural extension of her teaching interests and commitment to interdisciplinary education that employs the arts, humanities, and social sciences to gain insight into science, technology, and medicine.