Presentation of the group

We are a group of scholars at the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Medicine, AU, who wishes to develop our collaborative work on the highly interdisciplinary theme and project: Anatomical Theater: Early Modern and Contemporary Dissection as Investigative Art. In the project we will analyze the investigative functions of literature, visual arts, and theatricality in early modern and present-day explorations of bodily interiors.

The project brings the aesthetic disciplines together with medical history, contemporary medical education, and digital humanities. Through a number of planned research activities, we aim to enhance our understanding of the role of the arts and humanities in probing the ethical and affective dimensions of dissection. The project has three components: (1) comparative analyses of narrative, artistic and theatrical framings of dissection, past and present; (2) two research-led workshops exploring digital and theatrical re-enactments of historical and contemporary dissection practices; (3) an interactive Virtual Reality-model that allows the user to explore spatial, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of an early modern anatomical theater and its present-day equivalent. The full development, especially of this last component, is dependent on financing (application has been sent to Velux and will be sent to Augustinus Foundation). Both the workshops and the VR-model will be developed and tested in collaboration with medical training at Aarhus University and with the project’s main external partners—Medical Museion Copenhagen and Boerhaave Museum, Leiden—giving access to stakeholders and the public. The project aims to advance the field of medical humanities through a model of multidisciplinary, practice-based research and to generate future research and educational development in both the arts and medicine.

Due to its interdisciplinary character (across faculties), we are very interested in developing its core ideas in collaboration with researchers at AIAS who might be interested in this. AIAS researchers will be invited to seminars and research activities.