Volker Hess
Volker Hess is the head of the Institute for History of Medicine at the Charité and also affiliated professor at the History Department of the HU Berlin. Trained in medicine and philosophy, he entered the academia with analysing the hospital as institution and space in which medical concepts, scientific theories, state interests, public demands, economic restraints and educational functions were negotiated. More recently, he has turned to the cultural history of medicine. He is vice-chair of the DFG Graduiertenkolleg “Gender as a category of knowledge“ at the Humboldt University Berlin, and he is chairing a DFG research group on the “Cultures of madness“. In 2011 he has been awarded the Advanced Investigator Grant from the ERC for a new collaborative project (together with Andrew Mendelsohn) in reconstructing the “paper technology“ of medical practices.
As part of his Fellowship, Volker Hess is working on the project Madness goes downtown. Strasbourg and Berlin in the rise of modern psychiatry, in collaboration with USIAS fellow Christian Bonah.