Stephanie M Hilger

Stephanie Hilger is a scholar of eighteenth-century literature and culture, with a focus on gender studies and medical humanities. She is Professor of German and Comparative Literature. In addition, she holds appointments in the European Union Center, French, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Since 2021, she has also been affiliated with the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, where she regularly teaches a course in the medical humanities.

Her interest in the intersection of the humanities and medicine is represented in her two most recent publications. Her monograph, Medicalizing Difference: The Eighteenth-Century Construction of the “Hermaphrodite” (2024) reads eighteenth-century medical case histories against the grain to demonstrate that, rather than describing a fact, these texts created their object of study. Her edited collection, The Health Humanities in German Studies (2024), is the first full-length study to bring together these two fields; it surveys current critical terrain and explores further directions. Her current project, titled “Bodies of Knowledge: Eighteenth-Century Medicine as a Humanistic Interdiscipline,” demonstrates how medicine of the time simultaneously drew on areas that are now labeled as either scientific or humanistic.

Professor Hilger’s previous books, Gender and Genre: German Women Write the French Revolution (2014) and Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790 1805 (2009), also investigate eighteenth-century discourses regarding the body and gender. In addition to these monographs, Professor Hilger has (co-)edited three volumes in the medical humanities: Bodies and Transitions in the Health Humanities: Intelligible States of Corporeality (with Lisa DeTora, 2019); New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies (2017); and The Early History of Embodied Cognition from 1740 to 1920 (with John McCarthy, Nicholas Saul, and Heather Sullivan, 2015).

In 2019, Professor Hilger was awarded a grant for “The Art of Medicine: A Public Square on Health and Medicine for the Illinois System” from the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities at Illinois for curriculum development, research activities, and public outreach. Professor Hilger has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Program of Faculty Study in a Second Discipline, which allowed her to study embryology, the Humanities Research Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study.

In addition to several teaching awards from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Professor Hilger was recognized as the 2017 Medical Scholars Program Advisory Committee Outstanding Advisor of the Year.