David Korostyshevsky

History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Legal History | Alcohol, Drugs, and Addiction

I am an interdisciplinary historian whose research addresses the formation of modern personhood. I am especially interested in understanding the biopolitics of concepts like mental capacity and risk, and how they shape personhood, wellness, and belonging.

My first book project focuses on the governance of habitual drunkards, its legal implications for personhood, family, and property, and the biopolitics of compulsion before “drugs” and “addiction” became problems altogether.

I am an Instructor (continuing-appointment) in the Department of History at Colorado State University. I hold a Ph.D. in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine from the University of Minnesota.

BOOK PROJECT(s)

My first book project—Drunkard: King Alcohol, Compulsive Drinkers, and the Nineteenth-Century Challenge to American Democracy—explores the early American quest to define, detect, and discipline the “habitual drunkard.” Animated by profound anxieties about the drunkard’s incapacity to care for the dependents and property in his household, legislatures empowered courts to put habitual drunkards under guardianship, grant their wives divorces, and uphold policies that excluded them from life insurance. Some states also disenfranchised persons under guardianship. Intended to protect his family and property from abuse and waste, the habitual drunkard’s loss of property, contract, and voting rights, the dissolution of a marriage, and denial of a life insurance application also punished him. These non-criminal consequences governed habitual drunkards and their households long before federal drug control and Prohibition. Uncovering the construction of habitual drunkenness as an inchoate medico-legal category of self-inflicted disability illuminates a complex nineteenth-century biopolitics of compulsion that anticipates enduring tensions between the medicalization of addiction treatment, punishment, mass incarceration, and more recently, harm reduction.

This research builds a foundation for two future research trajectories. First, I will focus on the expansion of guardianship and the evolution of medico-legal understandings of mental capacity. Second, I will study linkages between the exclusionary practices of the life insurance industry and the advent of modern healthcare systems.

PUBLICATIONS

“Incapable of Managing His Estate: Habitual Drunkards and the Expansion of Guardianship in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Law and History Review [under review].

“An Artificial Appetite: The Nineteenth-Century Struggle to Define Habitual Drunkenness,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine [forthcoming, Fall 2024].

“Corrupting the body and mind: distilled spirits, drunkenness, and disease in early-modern England and the British Atlantic world,” in Alcohol, psychiatry and society: Comparative and transnational perspectives, c. 1700-1990s, Waltraud Ernst and Thomas Mueller, eds. (Manchester University Press, 2022), 36-65.

“Valuing Process over Product: Writing to Learn in the Undergraduate History Classroom,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods vol. 46, issue 1 (2021): 10-22 [with Genesea M. Carter].

“Beyond Cardiac Surgery: Owen H. Wangensteen and the University of Minnesota’s Contributions to Mid-Century Surgical Science,” Minnesota Medicine (January/February 2018): 22-25.


TEACHING

My teaching is centered on making historical knowledge accessible and relevant to students, scholars, and the public. I harness the power of writing, self-reflection, and collaborative learning to move beyond the memorization of names, events, and dates. Instead, I show that history is an active study and interpretation of historical documents and scholarship. I am deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom by prioritizing underrepresented voices on the syllabus and assigning low-stakes and self-reflective writing so students can work with challenging new ideas without the fear of “getting it wrong.” I want students to leave my classroom with a greater appreciation for the complexity of historical analysis, sensitivity to silences and omissions in historical knowledge, and the ability to critically evaluate the reliability and significance of information. Ultimately, I strive to make historical knowledge accessible and relevant so that students become well-rounded, socially conscious citizens.

APPOINTMENTS

Colorado State University (2021-Present)
Department of History

U.S. History to 1876
Alcohol and Drugs in U.S. History
Pandemics in U.S. History
Antebellum America
Civil War Era

University of Denver (2020-2021)
Department of History

Disease in Early America
Alcohol, Drugs, and Addiction

University of Minnesota (2014-2018, Teaching Assistant)
Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Health, Disease, and Healing
Health Care in History
Technology and Medicine in Modern America
Technology and American Culture


INTERVIEWS

Jessica Comola, “COVID-19 and the History of Disease in Early America,” College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science, University of Denver, June 16, 2020.

Jake Steinberg, “Hear to stay: UMN faculty take to podcasting,” The Minnesota Daily,
February 11, 2019.