PD Dr. Patricia A. Gwozdz
Interdisciplinary Research Cultures between the Humanities, Arts, & Sciences
Ecce figura
What do Jesus, Socrates and the man-machine have in common? - “Each of these figures is the figura of the other: It is their announcement and fulfillment.”
Ecce figura sees itself as a compendium of interdisciplinary conceptual history between literature, philosophy and theology that invites us to read and expand in new constellations.
Podcast
I speak with scientists from the Natural Sciences and the Humanities about their work, their passion and their suffering within and beyond their academic lives. This podcast is a feature to my book “Virale Wissenschaft: Über die Grenzen verständlicher Forschung” (2023).
Now available on all podcast platforms and on YouTube, follow the link!
Embodied Histories
As we lay bearing
Vulnerability of Pregnant Bodies in the History of Medicine and Visual Arts
Panel Concept and Organization by PD Dr. Patricia A. Gwozdz at the 16th Annual Conference of the International Society for Cultural History 04.-06. September 2024 – University of Potsdam, Germany
See the whole panel program of our guests here
Talks & Lectures 2025
The Womb within the Womb: Refashioning Motherhood between Theology, Psychology and Natural History in Early Modern Spain
at the Open Panel “Studying Religion(s), Motherhood and Mothering in Interconnected Worlds” organized by Dr. Florence Pachard Guinard at the XXIII International Association for the History of Religions World Congress at the Jagiellonian University Kraków, Poland, 24.-30. August 2025
Being-Together-at-Risk: Natality, Nationality, and Vulnerability from Latin America to East-Central Europe
at the International Conference “The Politics of Literature between East-Central Europe and Latin America” organized by Dr. Agnieska Hudzik & Dr. José Luis Nogales Baena, University Saarbrücken 2.-4. April 2025
All Talks, Keynotes, Lectures
Projects
In my international research networks we work on topics about the comparisons and entanglements of world literature from Europe to Latin America and beyond, the history of life science, philosophy and anthropology of man and machine, the narrative medicine and medical humanities of pregnant bodies and female vulnerability as well as general considerations on the epistemology of time, history, and cross-disciplinary methods.
New projects focus on comparative motherhood studies, the modern reception of ancient masculinity in arts, media and literature as well as interdisciplinary studies on vulnerability through the ages.
Books
As a comparative literary scholar I work across philological disciplines on topics about Life Sciences, Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, Popular Science Writing and the Interdisciplinary Conceptual History of Figures, Machines and Vulnerability.
Teaching
Only those who compare can combine, and only those who combine can develop their own theses and deepen competencies in transdisciplinary connections.
Research Area 1: Narratives of Science and Science as Narrative
Medical Humanities & Life Writing between Suffering and Convalescence
Does medicine represent a certain kind of art of healing? Or do literature and writing heal us because they give our suffering a new form and make it more bearable? The research fields of Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine unite the knowledge cultures and experience of doctors and patients, writers and artists, scientists and laypeople who are trying to engage in a sustainable and productive exchange about concepts of illness, health and recovery. This is a promising endeavor in which I participate with my books, talks, and lectures.
Natural Science, Fictional Literature & Popular Culture
Interdisciplinarity is often just a fashionable buzzword and transdisciplinarity a utopian vanishing point. In its long history, popular science has used both forms of communication and thus promoted theories, theses and ideologies outside and within the academic-scientific field. Anyone who wants to know how science communication works today must not ignore the long history of its development. In order to understand the "homo academicus" and his "libido sciendi" (Bourdieu), we need to understand why he is afraid to use the term “popular” and how literary fictions can help him to create new forms of knowledge narratives.
Research Area 2: Interdisciplinary Approach to the History of Concepts, Metaphors, Ideas
We are all figures!
Figures arise from movement. We live and think in figures. Nature creates, human beings decipher and draw figures. In my book "Ecce figura. Lektüren eines Konzepts in Konstellationen (100 v. Chr.-1946)", I followed the theological, philosophical and literary traces of this concept from Tertullian to Paul Valéry, from Augustine to Nietzsche's Zarathustra and beyond. A compendium of readings between past and future, genesis and genealogy, creatures without God and wombs contra genus - open to revision!
The life of the machine in metaphors
Machines are human products. Humans have created and made them. The world of machines is a human world and together with them we are creating new worlds that are still unknown to us. Man and machine are becoming ever closer, so that natural and artificial life are becoming indistinguishable. Philosophers, engineers and scientists have invented metaphors to describe the connection between life and machines. Literature, on the other hand, experiments with these metaphors and calls them into question. From early modern mechanics to thermodynamics and cybernetics, fictional experimentation has prefigured the future of ma(n)chines.
Research Area 3: Digital Storytelling & New Memory Studies
Digital Storytelling & Collaborative Writing
For Comparative Literature is no longer made in print culture but digital story telling in Social Media (Instagram/Wattpad) I early made clear that our reading scenes & skills are disappearing but are not yet forgotten (M.A. thesis on Walter Benjamin & Jorge Luis Borges, 2010,). I completed my final habilitation colloquium with the title “Erzählen en miniature: Fast Food Reading im Zeitalter seiner digitalen Reproduzierbarkeit” (02/2022) and developed my ideas further in talks, lectures and publications taking a closer look at reading cultures in a global context from the perspective of new media theory.
Transformation of Reading Scenes
Against the background of media-historical processes, Walter Benjamin and Jorge Luis Borges tell a prehistory of the reader (Urgeschichte des Lesers) from which a poetics of forgetting and memory for the 21st century is developed. Beyond the death of the author and the birth of the reader in the hypertext they sketch a topography of past and future readings beyond today's dichotomy of analog and digital memory skills. Instead of mourning the disappearance of older reading practices and their media, they point ahead to new digital reading and thus create a survival of the old in the new.
Research Area 4: Vulnus, Vulva & Vulnerability – Comparative Motherhood Studies & Global Literary History of Femicide
Comparative Motherhood Studies
Starting from my series lecture at the University of Potsdam “Of Monsters and Mothers: The Invention of Motherhood in Literature, Art and Sciences” (2022) I established an international research network of scholars from different disciplines such as Religion Studies, Art History, Gender Studies, History of Science and Medicine, Comparative Literature and Law Studies coming together in my new edited volume “Vulnerability of Pregnant Bodies and Motherhood from Ancient Times to the Modern World” (Routledge 2025, co-edited with Davina Höll). For mankind is »of woman born« as Adrienne Rich, feminist, activist, mother, writer, and scholar put it fifty years ago (Rich 1976), it is now an urgent task to reconsider the political, cultural, religious and social consequences of this feministic statement. My approaches want to intensify the historical view of pregnant bodies as vulnerable bodies, for the concept of vulnerability emerged as a modern one. Thus, it is important to ask how far we have to go back in history to trace the lines of laboring bodies and mothering between resilience and suffering. Our volume will be the first account bringing together researchers presenting and discussing images, diaries, scientific works, fictions, narratives, popular culture magazines, moving pictures and many more to clarify the hidden paths of history.
Global Literary History of Femicide
For several lectures and seminars on transareal feminism in Europe and Latin America (Potsdam, Rostock, Hannover) as well as public lectures in China at the Institute for Foreign Languages and Cultures (Hunan Normal University Changsha, 2024) I am working on a global literary history of femicide/feminicide. Literary history should be revisited to reveal the unwritten history of femicide starting with “1001 Nights” the tale of tales of World Literature in which Scheherazade saves her own life from death and ends her toxic relationship with her king and husband Schahriyar who killed every wife after the first night so that she could not betray him. This is the first account of a systematic procedure to kill women because of hate, jealousy, claim of ownership and political rights to do so without fearing consequences.
This is my starting point to write the unwritten history of global femicide starting with the craft of story telling itself: the female power of telling fictions like a thread without beginning or end, like Penelope’s eternal weaving artwork in Homer’s Odyssee, the comparative research will revisited canonical literature and its popular stepchildren in archives yet unknown to unleash the violence against women hidden in short stories, novels, poetry, art and science.
