2023 Distinguished Scholar Lecture
“The Clinical Complex: Reflections on Sick Buildings and the Architectures of Illness in Seven Images 1900/2020.”
by Fatima Naqvi, Yale University
NEW DATE!
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
4:30pm
Terrace Rooms BC, Mather Hall
This year's the lecture is being organized by Professor Jason Doerre and the German Section of the Language and Culture Studies Department
We are honored to host Fatima Naqvi, W. Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University.
The title of her lecture will be “The Clinical Complex: Reflections on Sick Buildings and the Architectures of Illness in Seven Images 1900/2020.”
The turn of the 20th century witnessed an explosion of hospital construction to counter widespread fears of contagion by implementing new principles of hygiene. In Austria-Hungary, a network of hospitals connects the growing urban centers of the 55 million-people-strong empire. This talk explores all aspects of the building boom as it is refracted in works by Arthur Schnitzler, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Otto Wagner. The hospital experience is traced into the early 21st century via works by Thomas Bernhard, Ulrich Seidl, and Nikolaus Geyrhalter. The architecture of medicine and the medicalization of architecture have important implications for how we think about sickness and health today—and how we experience these clinical spaces.
Fatima Naqvi is Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. She has written books on victimhood in European culture after 1968; the films of Michael Haneke; the degradation of the landscape; and the interrelationship between space and Bildung in author Thomas Bernhard. She is currently working on the hospital experience in fin-de-siècle Vienna.
