Educated in Germany and France, Janina Wellmann did her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and is Privatdozentin at TU Berlin. She has served as stand-in professor for the chair of history of science and technology at the University of Wuppertal, Harris Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth/NH, and Hans Jonas Professor at Hamburg University. In 2013, she joined Leuphana University Lüneburg as Junior Director at the Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation. Fellowships have taken her to the Remarque Institute and Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University (2025), the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (2017/18) or the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2013/14). Recently, she published Biological Motion. A History of Life (New York: Zone Books 2024). Other publications include The Form of Becoming. Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830 (New York: Zone Books 2017); Computer Simulation and the Life Sciences (ed., History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40/1, 2018); Cinematography, Seriality, and the Sciences (ed., Science in Context 24/3, 2011).

Janina Wellmann‘s project as NOMIS fellow investigates living borders, i.e. physical demarcations that are made from biological material such as skin, shell, crust, membrane, hide, bark, or epidermis, but also artificially made ‘living’ skins and ecological borders. Building on recent scientific insights into the skin microbiome, her research is dedicated to the plurality of skins and material boundaries in their common ecological nature. Borders are not only built and torn down, but grow and decay. Living borders have co-evolved with their surroundings over millions of years, are timeless dynamic objects, and yet archives of time. The project sheds a light upon the fact that by drawing a border at the natural world, research in the humanities has neglected a wealth of knowledge that conceives of living borders as natural collaborations of organisms and their environment, as surfaces where the natural, cultural and technological dynamically make and remake each other. The project interrogates the manifold ways in which humans relate to living borders. It explores forms of imagining, visualizing and modeling living borders; it studies the material, scientific and aesthetic practices and concepts to give them form and thereby initiates a novel interdisciplinary understanding of living boundaries as simultaneously natural and cultural ecosystems.