BIOGRAPHY
Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, culture writer, and journalist based in Berlin, Germany. She writes cultural criticism, literary essays, book reviews, and opinion pieces. She is a contributing writer for Frieze Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Baffler, Berliner Zeitung, Esquire, Frieze, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, Washington Post, among other publications.
Her writing explores how people navigate the difficult states of health—especially subjects that discuss contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, or illness narratives. Her book, A History of the World in Six Plagues (Simon & Schuster, US; Dialogue Books, UK; Ullstein Books, Germany), is forthcoming. Edna is the co-editor of After Sex (Silver Press), an anthology about reproductive justice. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, the Ludwig Maximilian Universität, the Camargo Foundation, Baldwin for the Arts, the Robert Silvers Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
In 2017, Edna graduated with a Ph.D. in History of Science from Princeton University. Her dissertation, “Plagued Bodies and Spaces,” examined the origins and progression of epidemics in North Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a historian, her research examines contagion, epidemics, and toxicity by asking: what makes people sick? As a writer, she is committed to critical storytelling. She invites her readers to sit with the messiness of contagion, the discomforts of disorders, and the power of embodied knowledge while finding people’s desire to heal. Edna’s writing about illness and health draws on her education, which includes a bachelor of arts in biology from Reed College, a master's in public health from Columbia University, and a doctorate of philosophy in the history of science from Princeton University.
Collective power is vital to her; as such, she is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Author’s Guild, and the National Writer’s Union. In addition, Edna’s multimedia artwork has been featured at the alpha nova galeria futura, ARIEL Feminisms, Austrian Association of Women Artists, Gwangju Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Savvy Contemporary Galerie, Kunstverein Hildesheim, Digital Prater Gallery, and other creative spaces. Edna co-hosts, As We See It, a radio show with Refuge Worldwide that explores the political and cultural scene in Berlin. In recent years, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Germany (Bard College Berlin, Free University Berlin, Humboldt University, and Universität der Künste Berlin) and the United States on cinema, race, global medicine, and pandemics. If you want to read her reflections about history, science, and culture, consider signing up to Edna’s Substack newsletter, Mobile Fragments.
For those who are dying to know, Edna was born and raised in Miami by cheeky working-class folk. Like her parents, Edna is always on the move, and she is currently based in Berlin, Germany.