Caitlin Powell

PhD supervisor: Professor Frederic J. Schwartz
Working title for PhD: 'Subtractive Posthumanism: Rethinking Received Notions of the Reproductive Body in Weimar Germany'

My research project aims to negotiate the position of reproductive bodies within the discussion of posthumanism in Weimar Germany. Over recent years, the notion of posthumanism has been key to studies of art and culture in Weimar, often characterised by a forced and thoroughgoing reconsideration of selfhood, well-explored through the figure of the inventor and prosthetics. My project challenges this exclusively masculine and augmentative narrative, examining the tension at play at the intersections of biopolitics and the abject in law-making and representations in visual culture. This will also help to explore an absence of images of termination throughout visual culture. I will be exploring a charged historical moment from the perspective, and with the new conceptual tools, of today, when the termination of pregnancy and the legal status of bodies, both born and unborn, are still issues of urgent and current social concern.

Awards:

• Winner of the Association for Art History Postgraduate Dissertation Prize 2019 for my MA dissertation ‘Gebärpflicht: The Subtractive Posthumanism of the Reproductive Body in Weimar Germany’.

Publications: 

• ‘‘She – the great agitator’: Käthe Kollwitz and the limits of empathetic spectatorship in Weimar Germany’ in Empathic Engagements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) [forthcoming]

Conference Papers:

• ‘The Problem of the Public: Abortion in German Health Fair Culture (1925 – 1931)', Association for Art History Annual Conference,  April 2023 [forthcoming] 
• ‘Subtractive Posthumanism: Pregnancy and Termination in Interwar Germany’, Posthumanism and the Posthuman: Chances and Challenges in German and European Literature and Culture, March 2023 [forthcoming] 
• ‘Costume and Viscera: (re)materializing the rationalised woman in Weimar Germany’, The Institute of Contemporary History Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Évora, 24th May 2022 
• ‘‘She – the great agitator’: Käthe Kollwitz and the limits of empathetic spectatorship in Reproductive Rights Campaigns in Weimar Germany’, Association for Art History Annual Conference, 9th April 2022 
• ‘Gebärpflicht: Dada and Reproductive Rights in Weimar Germany’, Dada & Surrealism Research Group, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, 26th January 2021 

Scholarships and Awards: 

2022 

• Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Short-term Research Grant at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Germany  

2020 

• Department Research Studentship, 2020 – 2023 
• Winner of the Association for Art History Postgraduate Dissertation Prize 2019 for MA dissertation ‘Gebärpflicht: The Subtractive Posthumanism of the Reproductive Body in Weimar Germany’ 

Teaching: 

• ‘Second Year Advanced Lecture Course: The Modern Arts of Living’, HART0036, 2023 
• ‘History of Art & Its Objects’ HART0001, 2022