The research conducted by the chair is dedicated to the study of structural changes in knowledge systems from a long-term and intercultural perspective, with a particular focus on the sciences. The goal is to gain a better understanding of the status of scientific knowledge, both in terms of its epistemological status and its role in human societies. This goal is pursued through empirical, i.e., source-based, research on historical processes of knowledge transformation.

How does collective imagination take shape under digital conditions and who gets to shape it? Imagination is a cultural force at work in the great transformations of our time: in how we speak about climate, cities, and the future, in the visions societies hold of what is possible. Artificial intelligence is understood here not as a tool but as an epistemic actor and cultural system: a co-shaper of the conditions under which knowledge is produced and futures are imagined. This raises a pressing question: whose imaginations enter these systems, and whose are systematically left out?

What does it mean – historically and in the present – to be healthy? How do medical, cultural, and media-based epistemologies shape our understanding of bodies, illness, and normality? And which political, ecological, and ethical questions emerge in the context of the Anthropocene, planetary crises, and new technologies?
Research in the field of Medical & Health Humanities brings together German and comparative literary and theatre studies with cultural and social-science approaches to Anthropocene research, histories of affect and the body, and the Medical Humanities.