PD Dr. phil. habil. Jennifer S. Henke

I am a literary and cultural studies scholar, a specialist in gender studies, film and the history of science, and a passionate tea drinker with a North German charm. My most recent project in the field of the medical humanities investigates the material-discursive representation of the reproductive body in Anglophone literary and cultural artefacts of the long eighteenth century. The resulting habilitation thesis or 'second book' was submitted to the University of Bonn in November 2022, accepted in October 2023, and is forthcoming with Routledge in early 2024 (under contract).

Until September 2021, I held a position as stand-in professor for English literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. In October 2021, I joined the department of British and North American Studies at the University of Greifswald, Germany, where I held the position of interim professor for Anglophone Gender Studies until September 2023. Since January 2024, I am an unwaged adjunct professor ('Privatdozentin') at the University of Bonn, Germany. 

I have given numerous talks all over the world and have published nationally and internationally in peer-reviewed organs on topics ranging from Shakespeare on screen, literature and science, manga and metaphor, maths and madness, Mary Wollstonecraft, the abortion law in Ireland to Canadian short stories to cyborgs and gender. My teaching record includes but is not limited to constructions of the body in eighteenth-century literature, Gothic fiction, science and satire, imperial fictions, graphic literature, literatures of addiction, drug cultures, utopian fictions, Shakespeare and postcolonial ecocriticism as well as introductions to Anglophone literatures and cultures.