The POLY Research Group will organise a series of public lectures during the winter term of 2025/26 at Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg. Outstanding researchers from disciplines other than history will share their insights to enrich our historical perspectives. The second lecture will be delivered by Professor Paula Irene Villa-Braslavsky (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität).

BodyPracticesWriting: The Challenges of Lived Embodiment

Long gone seem the times when social sciences and humanities naively (and symptomatically) reproduced such dualisms as mind/body, affect/rationalism, private/public – and others – which were and partly remain constitutive for modern societies and modern science. Embodiment has actually become a, more or less, mainstream perspective in disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, literature studies, history, etc.

In my presentation, I will critically engage with the notion of ‘embodiment’. I will try to disentangle various dimensions of ‘embodiment’, both in regards to academic analysis and mundane everyday empirical practices. Drawing on phenomenology, practice theory, feminist and further contemporary perspectives, I will argue that while embodiment is never fully writeable, there are in fact productive and creative ways of acknowledging the specificities of ‘lived embodiment’ (Leiblichkeit) in academic writing.

Prof. Dr. Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Her research focuses on gender studies, bio- and body politics, cultural sociology, and the sociology of care and caregiving work.
She has received numerous awards for her work. In addition to her own publications and editorial projects, she is active in various professional societies, juries, and advisory boards, and was President of the German Sociological Association (2021–2025). Since May 2023, she has been Chair of the Academic Advisory Board of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism.