Janina Wellmann

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 studies, and technology studies.

Janina obtained her habilitation at the Technische Universität Berlin and holds a joint PhD (cotutelle de thèse) from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and Technische Universität Berlin. She was Harris Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College in May 2022. She spent the academic year 2017/18 as a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the academic year 2013/14 at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Janina Wellmann’s latest book, Biological Motion: A History of Life, appeared with Zone Books in spring 2024. Previous publications include The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760–1830 (Zone Books, 2017) and the special collection “Computer Simulations in the Life Sciences” in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40, no. 4 (2018).