Health Humanities in German Studies

Stephanie M. Hilger is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), where she also holds an appointment in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

• ForewordStefani EngelsteinBoundaries and Interdisciplines: Where Health Humanities Meets Literature & Science in German StudiesIntroductionStephanie M. HilgerIntersections: Health Humanities and German StudiesPART I: Medical Readings/Reading MedicineKatharina Fürholzer “Verschlungen sitze ich / neben der Sprache:“ Aphasic Poetry between Medicine and MetaphorAnita Wohlmann and Katharina BahlmannThe Totality Trap of Reading Illness: Unica Zürn’s The House of IllnessesAmanda ShefferDr. Max Liebermann’s Vienna: Diagnosis, Gender, and Criminality in Historical Crime FictionMadalina MeirosuTeaching “Outbreak Narratives” during the COVID PandemicPART II: Graphic Medicine Marina RauchenbacherComics from the German-Language Realm and Health Humanities: An OverviewKatja HergesDisability and Embodiment in Contemporary German ComicsPriscilla LayneDrawing on Pain: Depicting Disability and Trauma in Mikael Ross’ Graphic Novel Der UmfallElizabeth Nijdam“Thinking in Comics:” Representing Autism Spectrum Disorder in Autobiographical Graphic NarrativePART III: Disability Anne WaldschmidtDisability = Behinderung? The Conceptual History of a Social Category in Germany from a Disability Studies PerspectiveHeidi HausseA New View of an Old Prosthesis: Creating a Digital 3D Model of a Sixteenth-Century Iron HandHeike BartelRewriting Illness from the Turkish German Margins: Eating Disorders in Narratives by Renan Demirkan and Yade Yasemin ÖnderAlec CattellTeaching at the Intersection of German Studies and Disability StudiesPART IV: Race Gabi KathöferWork, Disability, Race: Toward an Intersectional, “Unsettling” Analysis of German Settler Colonialism Julia RoosThe Post-1945 Eugenics Consensus and the Persecution of Germans of Color in the Third Reich: A Legal Case StudyHeikki LempaTea, Race, and Ethnicity: Medical Knowledge of the Others in the German Lands, 1700-1830PART V: Gender Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio Suspicious Body Parts and Endangered Femininity: Western Medical Knowledge about Female Genitalia and Practices of Genital Cutting in the Early Modern AgeBenjamin R. DavisEstablishing a New Order?: Queer Performativity, Embodied Precarity, and the Pathologization of the Transgressive Body in Melusine (1456) and Fortunatus (1509)Joela Jacobs and Bastian LasseMaking Intersex Identity ILLegible: Oskar Panizza’s “Ein scandalöser Fall”Necia ChronisterReading as a Trans-Corporeal ActPART VI: TraumaEleoma BodammerDeath by Despair: Destroying Health in Schiller’s Die RäuberAllison SchmidtThe Bodies Kept the Score: Two Case Studies on Health and Violence after the Great WarAnke PinkertRefracting War Violence: Psychiatric Discourse in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the Early East German StatePART VII: Animals and the EnvironmentBrian McInnisThe Animals among Humankind: Fables of Reason in Johann August Unzer's Medical Weekly Der ArztNicole TheszDangerous Bodies: Witches in German Fairy Tales and the Literary ImaginationDavina Höll“Vollkommene Organismen:” The Beginnings of a Literary Imagination of the Microbiome

This book is as innovative as promised and will start to fill a yawning chasm of interest. The time for health humanities in German Studies is now.