University Lecturer will take interdisciplinary look at 'healings' of Lourdes

Ursula Link-Heer, professor and director of general and comparative literature at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, will present a University Lecture Monday, Oct. 7, at 4:30 p.m. in the Guerlac Room of the A.D. White House at Cornell.

One of Germany and Europe's best comparatists, Link-Heer's expertise in literary and film studies covers different disciplines, including German, French, Italian and Spanish, primarily. She has published on Proust, European film, philosophy and literary theory, as well as on more traditional aspects of literary history. "But her work is more widely interdisciplinary, in that she moves easily into the history of science and of the social sciences, especially medical history and psychopathology," said Joan Ramon Resina, Cornell professor of comparative literature in the Department of Romance Studies, in recommending Link-Heer to the University Lectures Committee.

The title of Link-Heer's lecture is "La foi qui guerit. The Miracle Healings of Lourdes: Science, Psychiatry, and Literature" -- which, as Resina points out, covers all of the areas mentioned above, in addition to the anthropological area of miraculous healings in the 19th century popular cult of Lourdes, in southern France.

Link-Heer's books include Proust's 'A la recherche du temps perdu' und die Form der Autobiographie (1988) and, with Jürgen Link, Literatursoziologisches Propädeutikum; and she has published more than 70 articles and reviews.

Link-Heer earned her Ph.D. in Romance philology at Ruhr-Unversität Bochum in 1979 and her diploma in education (habilitation degree) in Romance and general literature at the Unversität-Gesamthochschule Siegen in 1988.

She has been an assistant professor in Romance studies at the Unversität-Gesamthochschule Siegen (1985-1993), a visiting professor in comparative literature at the University of Montreal (1989) and a visiting professor in comparative literature and in French and Italian at the University of Minnesota (1987).