Skye Shannon Savage
Skye Shannon Savage is a doctoral candidate in Columbia University’s Germanic Languages and Literatures Department, as well as the certificate program of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her research is situated at the intersection of science and literature, with a particular focus on medicine, ethics, and disability. Her dissertation, titled The Performativity of Diagnosis: Medicine, Identity, and Fascism in Postwar Germany, examines the interlocking discourses of medical science, politics, and literature of the postwar period. For the years 2024-2025 she has been awarded a GSAS Teaching Scholars Fellowship for innovative syllabus design, and will teach a new course on the Medical Surreal in Spring 2025. In 2023-2024 she was a recipient of a 1-Year Research Fellowship sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and spent the year in Berlin conducting research in support of the dissertation in the archives of the Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik, a psychiatric clinic active throughout the 20th century in Berlin. At Columbia she is also active in the Motherhood and Technology Working Group, and in 2023 helped organize the interdisciplinary conference Conception and Its Discontents, which brought together scholars from differing fields and institutions in order to discuss the complex ethical, cultural and legal challenges of contemporary interventions into human conception.
Skye has also been active in teaching development and mentorship on campus, currently working as a Teaching Consultant for the Center for Teaching and Learning. In 2022 she was awarded the departmental Graduate Student Teaching Award, and has led numerous workshops on pedagogical development for the wider campus community.
Forthcoming articles:
Cut Bodies: Unica Zürn’s Agential (Sur)realism. Journal of Medical Humanities. 2024.
Current research projects:
The Performativity of Diagnosis: Medicine, Fascism, and Identity in Postwar Germany. Dissertation advised by Dr. Claudia Breger, Dr. Mark Anderson, and Dr. Rishi Goyal.
Speaking in Signs: Deafness and Philosophy of Language in Enlightenment Europe (tentative title). Post-dissertation monograph project.