Katja Herges
I am a cultural studies scholar and physician. I hold a M.D. from the University of Heidelberg and a Ph.D. in German studies and Feminist Theory and Research from the University of California, Davis. Previously, I have had clinical and research positions in neuroimmunology, psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, and medical ethics. Based on my education, my research and teaching challenges boundaries of disciplines and methods.
My current research falls under the umbrella of the medical humanities and focuses on the connections between health care and contemporary German culture and literature. I inquire into the relations between visual and autobiographical culture, feminist theory, and critical disability studies, asking how cultural archives reflect on and sharpen our thinking about chronic illness and disability.
Specifically, my current project investigates posthuman imaginaries of illness, disability, and care in 21st century autobiographical narratives from the German-language cultural sphere. I ask about the ethical and political implications of autobiographical thinking beyond the human in the context of the contemporary health care crisis. While scholarship on illness narratives has focused on the Anglophone world, this book connects German pathographies with the rising fields of medical posthumanism and posthuman disability studies, thereby expanding contemporary discourses of subjectivity, agency, and care.
I have published in a wide range of disciplines from immunology, feminist theory to German literature, including venues such as Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, BMJ Medical Humanities, Women, Gender and Research, Literature and Medicine, Multiple Sclerosis,andScience Translational Medicine.The edited volume Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture (together with Elisabeth Krimmer) has been published with Camden House in 2021.
Email: katja.herges@uwr.edu.pl
