Prof. Dr. Anita Wohlmann

Anita Wohlmann is Associate Professor in Contemporary Anglophone Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense (SDU), where she is a member of the Center for Uses of Literature as well as the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics. She has a Master’s degree and PhD in American Studies from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany (JGU), and now teaches American literature with a focus on gender and age studies and Medical Humanities in the English program as well as courses in Narrative Medicine at the medical school at SDU.
During her time in Mainz, Wohlmann was a postdoctoral researcher in the DFG graduate program “Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience” (2014-2016), where she developed her independent research project with a strong focus on gender, “Body and Metaphor: Narrative-Based Metaphor Analysis in Medical Humanities,” which was funded by the German Research Foundation (2017-2020).
From 2015-2017, she was the project leader of the interdisciplinary teaching project “Patient Narratives,” funded by the Gutenberg Teaching Council at JGU Mainz. And since 2015, after a 4-months research stay at Columbia University, she has been facilitating courses and workshops in Narrative Medicine in Germany and Europe.
Wohlmann is a founding member and coordinator of the German Network for Narrative Medicine which was established in 2019. In 2019, the Volkswagen Foundation funded a workshop on “Data and Stories in Digital Healthcare” within the program “Mixed-Methods in the Humanities,” which Wohlmann co-organized with Dr. Susanne Michl, who is professor of Medical Humanities at Charité, Berlin. Since 2022, she is co-editor of the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal and co-editor of the newly established book series “Medical & Health Humanities: Aesthetics, Analyses, Approaches” at De Gruyter.
Wohlmann’s research is decidedly interdisciplinary, combining theories and methods from literary studies with gender studies, gerontology, medicine and pharmaceutical biology. Her focus on narratives as well as non-narrative forms, such as metaphors and stereotypes, tackles the question to which uses literature (and the humanities more generally) can be put. She is currently developing a research project that explores the limitations of narratives in the context of health activism (e.g. US-reproductive health discourses), where polarized rhetorics and a hunger for heart-wrenching, sensational stories dominate the conversation about human rights and access to health care