Lecture Series: Complex Bodies in Culture, Literature, and Science
Winter Semester 2025/26
This German-English lecture series explores the complexity of (individualist, relational and collectivist) body concepts and body images at the intersection of the humanities, rehabilitation sciences and medicine. It discusses how scientific discourses, literary works, films and other (multi)medial and social practices question or defer fixed classifications and essentialist, naturalised differences (e. g. ‘female’/ ‘male’, ‘nature’/ ‘culture’, ‘human’/ ‘animal’ / ‘machine’, ‘disabled’/ ‘non-disabled’, ‘normal’ / ‘abnormal’), hold them in suspense and generate productive symbioses, synergies, resignifications, bifurcations and transgressions. In the context of current biopolitical tendencies of simplification and reductionism, we invite you to join a critical examination of new interdisciplinary, intersectional and interdiscursive strategies of complexity production. Individual lectures will address current political, aesthetic and legal debates on as well as historical approaches to the topics of body/embodiment, gender, sexual orientation, illness, disability and racialisation.
Programme:
| 21. Oktober 2025 | Einführung (Katrin Röder und Sigrid Nieberle, Dortmund) |
| 28. Oktober 2025 | Katrin Röder (Dortmund): Gulliver’s Travels and the Narrative Aesthetics of Indeterminate Bodies |
| 4. November 2025 | Sneha Das (Zoom, Amity University, Noida, India): Cyborg Futures at the Crossroads: Disability, Gender, and Environmental Justice in the Age of Technological Integration |
| 11. November 2025 | Christoph Heyl (Duisburg-Essen): Aristocrats, Prostitutes, Social Climbers and Castrati: Legible and Ambiguous Bodies in William Hogarth’s Art, c. 1720–1760 |
| 18. November 2025 | Alice Kuzniar (Waterloo): Homöopathie am Schnittpunkt von Philosophie, Literatur und Medizin um 1800 |
| 25. November 2025 | Sigrid Nieberle (Dortmund): „… und alle dazwischen und außerhalb“? Intersexualität im literarischen Text |
| 2. Dezember 2025 | Elizabeth Schlappa (Newcastle University): Sexual tensions: Women’s pleasure and self-pleasure in eighteenth-century medicine |
| 9. Dezember 2025 | Christine Vogt-William (Bayreuth): Complex Bodies, Complex Desires: Biological Twinship and Intersectional Sibling Spaces in Contemporary Anglophone Literary Texts |
| 16. Dezember 2025 | Olaf Berwald (Middle Tennessee State U): Trauma und Lyrik: Innere Blutungen im Leib der Dichtung |
| 13. Januar 2026 | Corinna Herr (Koblenz): Künstliche Körper – Künstliche Stimmen? |
| 20. Januar 2026 | Kordula Knaus (Dortmund): Cross-gender casting und cross-dressing. Komplexe Körper auf der barocken Opernbühne |
| 27. Januar 2026 | Elisabeth Punzi (Göteborg): Violence toward persons with intellectual disabilities |
| 3. Februar 2026 | Christina Slopek-Hauff (Dortmund): Tracing the Contours of the Lesbian: Carnal Embodiment in Narrative |
Organisation:
Prof. Dr. Katrin Röder and Prof. Dr. Sigrid Nieberle
Time & Venue:
The lecture series takes place on Tuesdays from 2 to 4 p.m. (c.t.) at TU Dortmund University, Emil-Figge-Straße 50, 44227 Dortmund, in Lecture Hall 2.
The lecture is open everyone interested and students from all degree programms.
Students of TU Dortmund University can register via LSF.