New UHH Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society

30 May 2023

Nucleus Professor of Modern History, Ulf Schmidt, Faculty of Humanities, establishes new Centre to foster transdisciplinary collaboration on the relationship between health, ethics, and society.

We are delighted to announce the establishment of the Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society (CHES) (https://www.ches.uni-hamburg.de) within the Faculty of Humanities, led by Nucleus Professor Ulf Schmidt with his research team. When Professor Schmidt arrived at the University in the summer of 2020, he came with the idea of creating a research centre that would not only encompass the history of medicine, science, politics, culture, and law but also embrace interdisciplinary research to explore the complex interactions that impact lives and experiences across national borders. Through its research activities and collaborative projects, CHES aims to provide crucial insights into the lived commonalities and differences that have shaped the course of twentieth and twenty-first century history.

CHES is host to Professor Schmidt’s ERC Synergy Grant project 'Taming the European Leviathan' (https://leviathan-europe.eu), in collaboration with Principal Investigators at the Charité (Professor Volker Hess), Central European University (Professor Judit Sándor), and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Professor Anelia Kassabova). The Centre has also recently undertaken projects in collaboration with the HFBK (https://www.ches.uni-hamburg.de/news/hfbk.html), and curated an online exhibition for children with ‘Gruffalo’ artist Axel Scheffler (https://kidditorial.de). CHES is currently developing further high-impact interdisciplinary projects with partners both inside and outside the University, including the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, Centre for Structural Systems Biology, and the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. The CHES team would like to thank the University, the Faculty of Humanities, and the Department of History for their support, and we very much look forward to working together in the coming years.

Professor Ulf Schmidt and the CHES team