Medical & Health Humanities
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. Particular attention is paid both to the transformative periods around 1800 and 1900 and to contemporary reconfigurations of care, vulnerability, and environment in the context of planetary crises. Literature, theatre, and performative practice are understood as epistemic spaces in which social imaginaries and forms of collective self-understanding become visible, negotiated, and transformed.
Key areas of research include:
- literature, theatre, and medicine from historical and systematic perspectives
- histories of the body, affect, and health
- cultural dimensions of care, vulnerability, and psychosomatic knowledge
- cultural approaches to Anthropocene and environmental research
- interdisciplinary, practice-based, and artistic approaches within the Medical & Health Humanities
Methodologically, the professorship works at the intersection of history and poetics of knowledge with cultural theory, drawing on Gender and Queer Studies, Environmental Humanities, and artistic research.
Key Projects:
Poetics of Knowledge: Literature, Theatre & Medicine
The Medical Knowledge of Theatre: A History of Fascination and Poetics of Psychosomatics (1750–1970)
2019–2024, Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF-PRIMA), Department of German Studies, University of Zurich
At the centre of the habilitation project The Medical Knowledge of Theatre: A History of Fascination and Poetics of Psychosomatics (ca. 1750–1970) was the historical relationship between theatre, dramaturgy, and psychosomatic thought. The project departed from the observation that both psychosomatic medicine and theories of theatre and tragedy draw on related concepts of affect, embodiment, and theatricality. While psychosomatic medicine continues to employ terms such as “staging,” “body representation,” or “scenic understanding,” theatrical traditions since antiquity have understood affects as psycho-physical states unfolding between body, emotion, and social situation.
The project examined these intersections as a history of knowledge connecting the psychosomatic and the theatrical from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It focused on three historical constellations: melancholy around 1800 (BodySpaces), hysteria around 1900 (BodySigns), and exhaustion and network cultures around 2000 (BodyNetworks). In doing so, the project combined literary and theatre studies with approaches from the history of medicine, the history of psychiatry, and the Medical Humanities.
Selected publications from the project context:
Sprechende Körper, pathogene Umwelten: Psychosomatik & Theater.
Witt, Sophie. Sprechende Körper, pathogene Umwelten: Psychosomatik & Theater. Zürich; Berlin: Diaphanes 2025.
Embodiment and Critical Medical Humanities Multiple Practices and Shifting Concepts
Witt, Sophie; Kaiser, Celine; Schües, Christina; Borck, Cornelius. Embodiment and Critical Medical Humanities Multiple Practices and Shifting Concepts. Basel: Schwabe 2024.
Theatres of Psychosomatics
Witt, Sophie. Theatres of Psychosomatics. In Envisioning Embodiment in the Health Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2023.
Neuauflagen alter Affinitäten, oder Psychotherapie an der Charité (ab 1957): Neurosen, Künste, Ausdruckskörper.
Witt, Sophie. Neuauflagen alter Affinitäten, oder Psychotherapie an der Charité (ab 1957): Neurosen, Künste, Ausdruckskörper. In Body Politics. 2022.
Pathognomische Körper und Übertragungsszenerien: Goethes Singspiel Lila
Witt, Sophie. Pathognomische Körper und Übertragungsszenerien: Goethes Singspiel Lila. In Goethe medial. Aspekte einer vieldeutigen Beziehung. Berlin: De Gruyter 2021.
Soma und Sema, oder Psychosomatik literaturwissenschaftlich? (mit einem längeren Blick auf Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg)
Witt, Sophie. Soma und Sema, oder Psychosomatik literaturwissenschaftlich? (mit einem längeren Blick auf Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg). In Germanistik in der Schweiz 2021.
Nach Feierabend : Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte
Witt, Sophie; Böhmer, Maria; Bärnreuther, Sandra (ed.). Nach Feierabend : Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte. Zürich: Diaphanes 2020.
Witt, Sophie. 'Ist's erlaubt, daß ihr so einen Lärmen macht?' Therapie/Spiel und Fest/Schrift mit Goethes Lila. Ein Festspiel. In Fest/Schrift. Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2019.
Moderne-Formalisierung. Theatrale Anthropologien bei Schiller, Kleist, Döblin
Witt, Sophie. Moderne-Formalisierung. Theatrale Anthropologien bei Schiller, Kleist, Döblin. In Kleist-Jahrbuch 2019. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler 2019.
Health & Art-Based Research
Graduate Program Being(s): Artistic Research in Transformative Contexts of Health
2025–2028, State research funding, University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK) in collaboration with the Institute for Liberal Arts & Sciences.
As part of the first PhD in Art Practice program at a German art college, the Graduate Program examines health, the body and life in the context of social, technological, and ecological transformations. Art-based research is combined with approaches from the medical humanities as well as health research in cultural and media studies, and artistic practice is developed as an independent form of knowledge.
Biopolitics Today
Since the 2000s, Foucault’s concept of biopolitics has been one of the central categories of critical analysis of the present. It has made a significant contribution to the examination of neoliberal forms of subjectivation as well as the political orders of life, health, and population. But what are the advantages and disadvantages of this concept for a changing present, which is increasingly discussed in terms of authoritarian shifts and a possible “fascistization”?
Biopolitics Today examines the current viability and necessary revision of biopolitical critique. The focus is on both new authoritarian and fascist formations and contemporary technologies of the self, particularly processes of therapeutization and psychologization.
The Fascistization of Bodies and Technologies?
The project connects the question of contemporary biopolitics with the question of whether—and in what ways—we are currently experiencing a process of “fascistization.” The aim is, on the one hand, to identify the specific points of transition at which (neo-)liberal biopolitics transforms into another form of biopolitics and, on the other hand, to answer the question of whether and to what extent this other form of biopolitics constitutes a “new fascism.” This is explored on two levels: At the technological level, current tech utopias and technological developments are examined: What kind of biopolitics is revealed in the fantasies expressed here of an eternal future in which humanity conquers space, human life is liberated from its biological shell, and diseases, wars, poverty, and even climate change could be subjected to effective, technology-supported, “superintelligent,” and “transhuman” interventions?
Second, this work builds on recent scholarship that demonstrates that “fascistization” also occurs on a physical level. Accordingly, the numerous continuities between our present and historical fascism give rise to a “sexy racism” (Herzog 2025), in which a culture that aestheticizes the individual self merges with a culture that aestheticizes the collective self of the nation, the flip side of which is an intensified practice of letting people die in the Anthropocene. The concept of biopolitics promises to provide a historicizing, in-depth analysis of this transformative process.
Virtuality and Healing: A Cultural and Media History of Cybernetic Rehabilitation (1950–2000)
Alexander Kamber
2026-2028, SNF Postdoc.Mobility
Further Imformation will follow.
Arts & Machines
Digital and biotechnological developments are transforming not only social practices but also conceptions of the body, nature, knowledge, and agency. The Arts & Machines research area examines these transformations from humanities and artistic perspectives. The focus is on how relationships between humans, machines, and other forms of life are being reconfigured—and what political, epistemic, and aesthetic orders emerge in the process.
Particular interest is directed towards artistic practices as forms of critical knowledge production: they make technological systems, their underlying assumptions, and their exclusions visible; they explore alternative human-technology relationships and open up new modes of critique and design.
Student Reasearch Group: Critical Agile Methodology (Hub for Crossdisciplinary Learning)
Linus Rothstein and Mats Wilms
The student research group Critical Agile Methodology investigates and tests how agile methods of software development can be made productive for research in the humanities and interdisciplinary collaboration—while at the same time subjecting them to critical reflection. The focus is on questions of critique and responsibility, co-creation, and collaborative knowledge production in the context of contemporary technologies. Digital tools and technological processes are not merely applied but become the objects of investigation.
In collaboration with the research group, the seminar “Arts & Machines,” led by Sophie Witt, was held during the summer semester of 2026 at the Institute for Liberal Arts & Sciences. The seminar explored the approach in a teaching context and combined theoretical perspectives from the humanities and critical AI studies with co-creative and iterative working methods.
Queer and Decolonial World Literatures
Neo-Baroque Movements (habilitation project)
The research project Neo-Baroque Movements investigates the transcultural circulations of the Neo-Baroque in and between Germany and Latin America since 1970. The study argues that the appeal of these Neo-Baroque iterations lies in the fact that baroque traditions had previously been marginalised by Enlightenment, bourgeois, heteronormative, and modern paradigms. The baroque is reclaimed in order to address avant la lettre queer/kuir as well as post- and decolonial questions.
As the central authors of the project – Hubert Fichte, Néstor Perlongher, and Pedro Lemebel – engaged extensively with the AIDS pandemic, the study analyses this corporeal-poetic discourse from the perspective of the Medical and Health Humanities.
Environmental Humanities
DFG-Network „Planetary Health: Planetary Thinking in the Social Sciences and Humanities“
Sophie Witt, Member of the scientific Network
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), this scientific network examines Planetary Health from the perspectives of the social sciences and the humanities. The focus is on the history of ideas surrounding planetary health, a critical reflection on its knowledge practices, and the development of interdisciplinary approaches to “planetary thinking” in the social sciences and the humanities.
Funding Period: since 2024
Applicant: Prof. Dr. Nina Mackert (University of Hamburg)
DFG-Project-Number: 546946850
-> Project Page
Flüsse
The 40% decline in the planet’s freshwater supply over the next ten years will affect the majority of the world’s population. Engaging with rivers can be understood as a necessary response—if only a partial one—to this essential challenge of our time. As “natural” boundaries, as limes, rivers have often been mythologized and exaggerated, both metaphorically and in reality, and exploited for (colonial) political ends. We understand rivers, both literally and figuratively, as entities of cross-border negotiation processes—for instance, regarding human, non-human, and planetary health—but we also take into account their poetic dimensions, which in turn reflect and shape these meanings. Fluvial systems call for fluid poetics that overflow disciplinary boundaries. In this overflow lies, at the same time, the subversive potential of an interdisciplinary exploration of rivers. Fluidity and “confluence”—a concept traceable to the quilombola master Antônio Bispo dos Santos—are figures of thought that lead beyond dominant epistemologies and aesthetics. Not least, they challenge the dichotomy between nature and culture in order to bring new or alternative meanings to the forefront in the face of the ecological crisis.
Publications & Public Events: