Dr. Manuela Rossini

CV (German) (English)

Degrees

Positions

Board and editorial activities

Book publications

Manuela Rossini. From House to Home. Family Matters in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. Saarbrücken: SWV, 2009.
This feminist-materialist study contributes towards a critique of the modern nuclear family in Western Europe by looking back at its cultural constructions and negotiations in early
modern England. Connecting the traces of the past to the politics of today, the book offers further bricks to the building of a cultural history of the meanings and practices of family life in their continuity as well as discontinuity. The family is here defined as a discursive field that
provides the framework for the analysis of the following interrelated concepts and categories, each being itself constituted by an ensemble of discourses: subjectivity, sex, gender, sexuality, love, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood and childhood, the public and the private, and the nation. While participating in postmodernity's deconstruction of these narratives, the author also dialectically links them to the non-discursive or material reality at the time of their initial production; i.e., to the historical specificity of the socio-economic and political fabric, in particular to the rise of possessive individualism, capitalism and the nation-state.

Manuela Rossini and Tom Tyler, eds. Animal Encounters. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
The fast-growing field of Animal Studies is a varied and much contested domain. Engagement with animals has encouraged both collaboration and conflict between researchers within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Animal Encounters comprises a series of meetings not only between diverse beasts, but also between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions. The essays here collected come together from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, ecocriticism and art history, philosophy and feminism, science and technology studies, history and posthumanism, to study that most familiar and most foreign of creatures, ‘the animal’. These encounters between leading practitioners in the field highlight the promise and potential of interspecies exchange and mutual provocation.

Current book project

Science/Fiction: Imagineering the Future of the Human
In the wake of the postmodernist challenge to the humanist values of the Enlightenment and, more effectively perhaps, due to the extraordinary advances in computer technology and biomedical engineering, the category of the human and its analogues – humanism, humanity, humane – are undergoing profound transformations. These changes raise the greatest hopes and deepest fears within contemporary human beings with regard to their individual identity as well as with regard to the future of the human species.
With the growing intersections between human, animal and technology, there are no longer any clear answers to questions such as what it means to be "human" and where "humanness" or "human nature" is to be found. Instead, "we" witness the death of the liberal-humanist subject as a coherent and autonomous being and the concomitant artificial birth of what has been referred to as "the posthuman" or "cyborg", an amalgam of various organic and non-organic components, an entity whose boundaries undergo continuous (de)construction and reconstruction.
The project focuses on the category of the post/human as constructed primarily in contemporary science fiction written in English but also as "imagineered" in theoretical and philosophical writings as well as in (popular) scientific texts on reproduction in a wide sense. The research starts from the premise that the popular genre of science fiction is an important cultural resource for dealing with those changes and, in turn, shapes developments in information and biomedical technology in crucial ways. Because of my contention that the hitherto separate spheres of science fiction, science and social reality are collapsing and in order to emphasise the narrative nature of scientific writings, I consider all the selected types of text as "science/fiction" to be subjected to a careful narratological analysis which is theoretically and methodologically informed by gender studies, bioethics, deconstruction and the cultural studies of technoscience.
My main research interests lie in the investigation of how human beings are "built" textually and how "human" is differentiated from other organic and non-organic entities. Special emphasis is given to the relationship between different "imagineerings" of the post/human and prevailing structures of gender and other inequality, hierarchies and discrimination: what/who does the term "human" include or exclude, and in whose advantage or disadvantage are such inclusions or exclusions?