Janina Wellmann is a cultural historian of science. Her work engages with concepts and debates in the modern and contemporary life sciences and biomedicine broadly conceived, with a particular focus on the epistemic foundations and interdisciplinary contextualization of current approaches and technologies. It encompasses technology, philosophy and aesthetics, and combines tools and perspectives from STS, anthropology, media and technology studies. Currently, she is stand-in professor in History and Technology of Science at Wuppertal University and visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science while being Privatdozentin at the Technical University Berlin. Previously, she held the positions of a founding Junior Director at the DFG-Kollegforschungsgruppe on “Media Cultures of Computer Simulation” at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Harris Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth/NH, Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

In her new book, Biological Motion. A History of Life, New York: Zone Books 2024, she explores how biological motion is key in guiding contemporary life science research into the organism’s molecular functions in the post-genomic era. The book uncovers motion’s long trajectory, from Aristotle’s animal soul to molecular motors, to medical soft robotics and mathematical analysis. It explores mechanistic philosophies, the perception, experimentation with and cognition of the nanoscale, systems biology and the animation of mathematics in visual representation. Her first monograph, The Form of Becoming. Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830, provided an innovative account of the advent of embryology in rethinking the meaning of development, a concept important to the emergence of a series of new disciplines around 1800.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9781942130819/biological-motion

https://www.skinecologies.humanities.uva.nl/

https://connerhabib.com/2024/05/29/what-is-movement-a-conversation-about...