Dartmouth Events

Rhythm. A new episteme in science, poetics and aesthetics around 1800
Dr. Janina Wellmann, Harris Distinguished Visiting Professor, Dartmouth College

Thursday, May 12, 2022
12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Zoom: Please register at https://dartgo.org/rhythmsciencepoeticsaesthetics
Sponsored by the Dartmouth College Department of History and Department of Chemistry

Janina Wellmann is a cultural historian of science. Her work spans the history of knowledge about the living world from the early modern period to contemporary science. It encompasses epistemology, media and material practices and uses tools from anthropology, literary and technology studies. At present, she is working at the research institute Media Cultures of Computer Simulation at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She came to Lüneburg after earning her M.A. at Humboldt-University zu Berlin and writing her doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She holds a joint degree (cotutelle de thèse) from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris and the Technical University Berlin where she also obtained her Habilitation. Wellmann was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in 2017/18, a guest professor at the Alexander von Humboldt Chair Naturbilder at Hamburg University in the summer of 2016, and spent the academic year 2013/14 at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Her first book The Form of Becoming. Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830 (Zone Books 2017) is a cultural history of embryology. In the book, she rethinks the meaning of development around 1800 in terms of rhythm as episteme in science and aesthetics and shows how the rhythmic episteme crystallized in various guises and fields of knowledge as diverse as music theory, poetry, embryology and pictorial series.

In her new book, Biological Motion (forthcoming with Zone Books), she studies the foundational relationship between motion and life. Biological motion is the first book to study animate motion and unearth the long history of investigations into the movements within and of the living world, from Aristotle’s animal soul to contemporary molecular motors.