Dr. Andreas Sudmann
Andreas Sudmann lehrte und forschte zuletzt als Medienwissenschaftler am John-F.-Kennedy-Institut (Abteilung Kultur) der FU Berlin. In Kooperation mit Shane Denson (Stanford University) leitete er dort das Teilprojekt „Digitale Serialität: Serielle Ästhetik und Praxis des digitalen Spiels“ im Rahmen der DFG-Forschergruppe „Ästhetik und Praxis populärer Serialität“. Im Juli 2016 hat er an der Fakultät für Philologie der Ruhr-Universität Bochum die Venia Legendi für das Fach Medienwissenschaft erhalten. Das Thema der Habilitationsschrift lautet: „Serielle Überbietung. Zur Fernsehästhetik und Fernsehphilosophie exponierter Steigerungen“. Zuvor war er u.a. Leiter der Abteilung Medienwissenschaft am Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Medienwissenschaft der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen sowie wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Medienwissenschaft der Universität Regensburg. Seine aktuellen Forschungsschwerpunkte sind u.a. Medien des maschinellen Lernens, Theorie und Geschichte der Medienkritik, Medienästhetik und –politik des Dokumentarischen.
Dr. Florence Vienne
Florence Vienne is research scholar at the Technische Universität Braunschweig. She co-directed the research project „Politics of the Living. A Study on the Emergence and Reception of the Cell Theory in France and Germany, ca. 1800-1900” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (2013-2016). Previously (2010-2013), she coordinated the scientific network “Economies of Reproduction. Interdisciplinary Research on the Past and Present of Human Reproduction, 1750-2010” funded by the DFG. Her research interests concern the history of the life sciences from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, with a focus on the history of cell theory and reproduction. Among her most recent publications is a co-edited special issue on “Temporalities of reproduction: practices and concepts from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first century” (in: History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, vol. 37, 2015). Her latest paper explores interrelations between cell theory and nineteenth century revolutionary politics (“Worlds Conflicting. The Cell Theories of François-Vincent Raspail and Theodor Schwann” submitted to Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences). Work in progress also includes a study on the relationship between cell theory, philosophy and religion in the nineteenth century.
Prof. Dr. Monique David-Ménard
Die Mercator Research Group 2 freut sich, Monique David-Ménard von der Université Paris-Diderot im April 2016 als Gast begrüßen zu dürfen. Dort war sie von 2005 bis 2012 Direktorin des Centre des études du vivant, das in den Grenzbereichen von Epistemologie, Lebenswissenschaften und Psychoanalyse forscht. Seit 1994 ist sie Mitglied der Société de psychanalyse freudienne und zudem Gründungsmitglied der Société Internationale de Philosophie et Psychoanalyse.
Das Anliegen ihrer Forschung ist es, psychoanalytische Grundannahmen mit Ansprüchen des philosophischen Denkens zu verbinden, so auch in ihrem zuletzt auf Deutsch erschienenen Buch Deleuze und die Psychoanalyse (Zürich, diaphanes 2009). In ihrem bereits 1999 in Übersetzung erschienenen Konstruktionen des Allgemeinen: Psychoanalyse, Philosophie (Wien, turia+kant 1999) arbeitet sie zur Funktion des Begriffs des Allgemeinen im Verhältnis zur Differenz der Geschlechter und zum weiblichen Begehren.
Im Zentrum des Aufenthalts von Monique David-Ménard an der MRG2 steht der von ihr gemeinsam mit Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky und Anna Tuschling organisierte Workshop „Ist die Übertragung ein Medium? Ein Dialog zwischen Psychoanalyse und Medientheorie“. In dessen Rahmen wird sie ihre aktuellen Überlegungen zu einer Konfrontation von Spinoza mit Freud und den Konzepten von ‚Conatus‘ und ‚Lebensnot‘ vorstellen und diskutieren.
Dazu sind alle Interessierten herzlich eingeladen. Die Veranstaltung findet statt am Donnerstag, 28. April von 14 bis 18 Uhr in Raum FNO 02/11 und am Freitag, 29. April von 10 bis 17 Uhr in Raum FNO 02/40-46.
Prof. Dr. Eric Livingston
Eric Livingston teaches in the School of Behavioural,Cognitive and Social Sciences at the University of New England, Australia. His research interests lie in the study of mundane expertise, the technologies of everyday life, and the work practices and practical reasoning of the discovering sciences. He is the author of The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics, Making Sense of Ethnomethodology, An Anthropology of Reading, and Ethnographies of Reason; his paper ‘The Disciplinarity of Mathematical Practice’ appeared recently in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
Prof. Dr. Staffan Müller-Wille
Staffan Müller-Wille is Associate Professor in the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences and Co-director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, at the University of Exeter (England), and he also holds an Honorary Chair at the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies of the University of Lübeck. He received his PhD from the University of Bielefeld (1997) and subsequently worked as scientific curator at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden (1998-2000) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2000-2004). He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, and has been particularly active in doctoral and postdoctoral training, serving on the board of directors of the Ischia Summer School of the Life Sciences. His research is interdisciplinary and international – as testified by fellowships in Berlin, Stockholm, Mexico City, Tel Aviv, Paris and Minneapolis – and covers the history of the life sciences from the early modern period to the early twentieth century, with a focus on the history of natural history, anthropology, and genetics. Among more recent publications is a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger on A Cultural History of Heredity (2012) and a co-edited collection on Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century (2013). Work in progress includes a new English translation of Gregor Mendel's paper "Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden" (1866) and a book-length study of the paper technologies that Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and his followers used to assemble and cross reference information on plants and animals.
Prof. Dr. Gianna Pomata
Gianna Pomata is professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She will be a visiting professor at the Ruhr University from October 1st to December 31st 2013.
Her research interests include the social and cultural history of early modern European medicine, women’s and gender history, and the history of epistemic practices, categories, and genres. She is currently at work on a book project titled "The Medical Case: A Cultural and Cross-Cultural History". The book examines the development of early modern European case narratives in a long-term and cross-cultural perspective, by tracing their antecedents in ancient Greek, medieval European and Arabic medicine, and by comparing them with the case collections that developed in pre-modern Chinese medical culture. The book brings a new, distinctive approach to this topic by considering the medical case as an “epistemic genre”, to be studied in relation to other fundamental genres, such as the medical recipe and the learned commentary.
At the Ruhr University, Prof. Pomata will teach a graduate seminar on "Epistemic genres: tools for the cultural history of knowledge".
Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Wegmann
The Mercator Research Group 2 welcomes Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Wegmann, who will be a guest researcher from July - December 2013.
Professor Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman is professor for social anthropology for science and technology at Lancaster University. During her stay as visiting senior researcher in April 2013 she will run an international workshop directed at graduate students. The workshop with the title "Thinking through Human Machine Reconfigurations" takes place on April 5, 2013.
Prof. Dr. Edna María Suárez Díaz
Edna is a historian and philosopher of biology who has specialized in the uses of molecular markers in evolutionary biology and, more recently, in the study of human populations. She has written on the consolidation of Molecular Evolution in the 1970s, and the construction of objectivity in molecular phylogentics, among other subjects. She is in charge of two research projects at the moment: „Internationalization and standardization of the life sciences after World War II“, and „Genes and atoms in Mexico during the Cold War era“. Among the specificic topics she is currently working is the study of Mexican indigenous populations during the 1960s.
Since 1996 she is Full Professor at the School of Sciences of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science between 2005 and 2008.
Prof. Dr. Soraya de Chadarevian
The Mercator Research Group welcomed Soraya de Chadarevian who joined the MRG-2 for the Spring Term 2013.
Soraya de Chadarevian is Professor in the Department of History and the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California Los Angeles. Her main area of research concerns the history of the biomedical sciences from the nineteenth century to the present, with special interest for the period after World War II. She is interested in the material practices of the biomedical sciences and the place of these sciences in the broader culture as well as in historiographical issues. She has worked extensively on the history of molecular biology and the complex cultural processes that participated in the development of the new science after World War II. Currently she is at work on a book about human chromosome research, population studies and discussions on human heredity in the middle decades of the 20th century.
Dr. Fabrizzio Guerrero Mc Manus
Fabrizzio is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Sciences at UNAM. He is a specialist in the intersections between Philosophy and History of Biology and the Studies of Sexuality. Right now, he is writing a history of the interplay between mexican biomedical institutions and the consolidation of a modern homosexual identity in Mexico. In his PhD. dissertation, he analyzed homosexuality in the context of philosophical accounts of mechanistic explanation and biopower. He successfully defended (with honors) his dissertation in November 2010. He has published papers on phylogenetic reconstruction, mechanistic explanation, narrative explanation, genomics and race in Mexico, and the biomedical construction of (homo)sexuality.
Professor Helen Verran
Helen Verran is a proponent of an empirical version of the philosophical anthropology that lies at the core of the Mercator approach to studying knowledge and culture practices. Currently she is completing a book for MIT Press Inventive Numbers/Natural Infrastructure in which circulations of environmental knowledge between distinct knowledge communities is traced. Natural scientists, policy makers, activists, politicians: all are seen to participate. In her work with the Mercator Group she will turn her attention to developing a methods text for studying such knowledge circulations/participations.
Helen Verran has taught in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne in Australia, since 1990, having spent most of the 1980s working as a science educator in Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria in West Africa. Her book Science and an African Logic, which grew from this experience won the Fleck Prize in 2003. An elaboration of the social and political agencies of numbers, it inspired her work with Aboriginal Australian landowners in Australia's Northern Territory, but also laid the foundations for her current work on environmental science knowledge.
As a Reader in HPS Helen maintains her intense involvement in research and teaching free of any obligations in university administration. She has supervised a large number of PhDs on a very wide variety of topics, currently supervising doctorates on ethnography of knowing a 'natural place'; on the digital technologies and the generative development of family intimacy; and studying risk philosophically and ethnographically, among others. At the University of Melbourne she currently teaches 'science and society', 'philosophy of biology', 'environment and knowledge', and 'knowledge in the postcolonial world'.
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Beilenhoff
Studium der Slavistik und Filmwissenschaft in Bochum, Prag und Moskau. In den 1980ern Mitglied der Konstanzer Forschergruppe ‹Intermedialität und Intertextualität›. 1991 Professur für ‹Theorie und Ästhetik des Films› am Institut für Medienwissenschaft der Ruhr-Universität Bochum. 2002 / 2008 Leiter des Forschungsprojekts ‹Medialität und Körper: Das Gesicht im Film› am kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschungskolleg / SFB 427 ‹Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation› (Universitäten Aachen, Bochum, Bonn und Köln). Gastprofessuren ZfL (Zentrum für Literaturwissenschaft, Berlin), RGGU (Staatliche russische Universität für Geisteswissenschaften, Moskau), EHU (Europen Humanitarian University, Vilnius) und LK (Laboratorium der Kinematographie, Tbilisi). 2008/2009 Senior Fellow am IKKM (Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar).
Prof. Dr. Michael Hagner
In June 2011 Michael Hagner stayed at the Ruhr-University Bochum. He gave a lecture on the topic "Krankheit schreiben" and worked together with the members of the Mercator Research Group in a workshop. Main topics of the workshop were the future perspectives of anthropological research.
Michael Hagner is an internationally renowned scientist, well-known for his work on the history of brain research. He works at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
