Research Area: Knowledge of Life
Reading and thinking have always been means to some end. These skills were believed to be vital to both the lives of individuals and collective bodies, such as nations. The idea that the arts produce and transmit knowledge relevant to life can be traced throughout history from notions of education during Antiquity to the modern Bildungsroman and into the concept of national literatures and cultures. But this conviction is faltering as the natural sciences now address subjects which according to the idea of ›two cultures‹ were once the exclusive domain of the Humanities dealing with subjects that used to pertain solely to the humanities (e.g., the definition of free will). Moreover, modern technology constantly generates new kinds of applied knowledge which erode the distinction of living and non-living as well as nature and culture. The research area »Life Knowledge« operates within the context of the challenges posed to the ›two cultures‹ model. Its interdisciplinary projects engage with the field of biology in particular as the leading science of life. Without ignoring the logic and traditions of specific disciplines or flattening them into a single, shapeless concept of culture, our research takes on the task of investigating how natural objects, artefacts, organisms, and human beings can be studied within a shared framework.
Current Research Projects
Projects of this research area, completed or processed in the past
(selected, chronologically sorted by year of completion)
- Climate and the Origins of Modernity 2017–2019 Dissertation project
- Negative Anthropology. History and Potential of a Discursive Formation 2017–2019
- The Epistemic Reverse Side of Instrumental Images 2013–2018
- Neuro-Psychoanalysis and Pain. Neurosciences between Natural Science and Cultural Studies 2014–2018
- Technology and Anthropology. Engineering and Humanities in dialogue 2017–2018
- The Future of Sustainability. Literature, Time, and the Environment 2016–2017
- Practices of Knowledge. Images in the History of Experimental and Applied Life Sciences 2014–2017
- Security and the Future. A Cultural Studies Approach 2014–2017
- Time and Form in Motion. Goethe's Morphology and Its Afterlife in 20th-Century Theory 2013–2017
- Bioethics. A Cultural Theory Approach 2014–2016
- Camouflage. Reading Landscape in Theater, Art, and War 1914–1945 2014–2016 Dissertation project
- Cultures of Madness. Liminal Phenomena of the Urban Modern Era (1870–1930) 2009–2016
- Borderline encounters with voice. A study of the pre-history of bioacoustics at the cutting edge of science, media technology and literature around 1800 and 1900 2014–2016 Dissertation project
- Discourses of Life. Paradigmatic Concepts around 1900 and its Significance for the Present 2013–2014
- The Face as Artifact in art and science 2011–2013 and 2014
- Skull Base Knowledge. Cultural Implications of Cranial Plastic Surgery 2011–2014
- The Eye in the Laboratory 2011–2013
- Cultural Factors of Inheritance 2011–2013
- Hereditary Chorea. Test – Diagnostic – Prognostic 2012–2013
- Organism and Culture. Conceptual Foundations and Boundaries of Biology 2012–2013
- Prognostics and Literature 2010–2013