The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures is pleased to announce an upcoming guest lecture by Professor Fatima Naqvi, Leavenworth Professor of German and Film at Yale University. The lecture, titled The Architecture of Illness: The Hospital Experience, Vienna 1880 to 1920, will take place on Friday, April 4, 2025, from 2:00 to 4:00 PM in the Michigan Room of the Michigan League.
In this talk, Professor Naqvi explores the rapid rise of hospitals in Western society over a short forty-year period, tracing how by the early twentieth century these institutions became nearly invisible fixtures in daily life, despite early resistance. Focusing on Vienna as a central case study, she examines the hospital not only as a physical structure but as a cultural and literary space.
Drawing on works by Arthur Schnitzler and Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as architectural treatises from the era, Professor Naqvi investigates how hospital design influenced public perception and individual experience. She highlights the social anxieties and architectural innovations that shaped early hospital life, from spatial uncertainty and rumor to the very architecture that mediated care.
Professor Naqvi currently serves as Chair of both the Film and Media Studies Program and the European Studies Council at Yale. Her scholarship has focused on the intersection of architecture and Bildung in the literature of Thomas Bernhard; landscape and its function in post-war West German culture; the rhetoric of victimhood in Western European Culture from the late 1960s to the present; and the films of director Michael Haneke. Drawn to the curmudgeons, querulous types, and naysayers of literature and film, she has recently written on Elfriede Jelinek, Ruth Beckermann, Friederike Mayröcker, and Peter Handke.
We hope you will join us for this thought-provoking exploration of illness, architecture, and cultural imagination.
