Dr Ina Linge
Visiting Fellow in Environmental Humanities, May-June 2025
Home institution: University of Exeter
Ina Linge (she/her) is Senior Lecturer in German in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies at the University of Exeter, where she is co-director of the Sexual Knowledge Unit, steering group member of the Heritage@Exeter network, and affiliate member of the Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities, and the Centre for Medical History.
Ina Linge’s research focuses on the production of sexual knowledge in early-twentieth-century Germany and Austria. She is particularly interested in the ways in which new ideas about sex, gender and sexuality were produced as a collaborative endeavour between the arts - literature, film and visual culture more broadly - and medical and natural sciences. More recently, her research has focused on the ways in which German-language artists, scientists and writers (1860s-1930s) mobilised knowledge about non-human animals and their natural environment to create new ideas about sex, gender and sexuality. You can hear her talk about her research on the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast.
Linge’s monograph Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing was published by Michigan University Press in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize. She is co-editor (with Birgit Lang and Katie Sutton) of Weimar’s Queer Visual Cultures, under contract with Toronto University Press for publication in 2026, co-editor (with Sarah Bezan) of a special issue on “Sex and Nature” for Environmental Humanities (2022), and co-editor (with Robert Craig) of the volume Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature Around 1900(2017). Her research has been published in German Life and Letters, Gender and History, History of Human Sciences, and Environmental Humanities. She is an editorial board member for the journal German Life and Letters. Her research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Academy & Leverhulme Trust, the Wellcome Trust and the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA).
Project title: Queer Natures: Animals, Environment and Modern Sexual Knowledge Production (1860s to 1930s and today)
At IASH, Linge will conduct research as part of her AHRC Catalyst-funded project “Queer Natures,” which investigates how German-language artists, scientists and writers (1860s-1930s) mobilised knowledge about non-human animals and their natural environment to create new ideas about the place of LGBTQ+ people in a fair society.