I am incredibly grateful for the support of the GHS Postgraduate Scholarship and the GHS Small Grant, which funded my language study, fieldwork, and conference attendance in Berlin and Potsdam over this summer. The experiences enabled by the support of the GHS have set me up with stronger language skills, a wealth of archival research, and a broadened academic network entering into my third year of PhD study.

Having studied German over the last couple years of my PhD through the courses offered at the Cambridge University Language Centre, I developed a solid foundation in the language, but required a more intensive and immersive experience to fast track my comprehension and spoken skills in order to engage more effectively with my source material. For my intensive language study this summer, I selected the ‘Deustch Erleben’ German Intensive course at the Humboldt University in Berlin, which was marketed as directly targeting the skills I wished to improve, particularly reading comprehension and written and spoken fluency. The course was not what I expected—in lieu of the structured syllabus advertised alongside the course, the course instructor adopted a more fluid approach. There were no graded assessments, and the emphasis of the course was almost exclusively on spoken fluency and auditory comprehension, with most of the daily 3 hour class spent in group conversation, with interludes for select grammatical exercises. At first, I was a bit surprised, as I was expecting a more directed learning experience, which I tend to prefer when it comes to language learning.

However, after the first couple weeks I began to notice that my auditory comprehension had improved significantly, which translated in turn to my reading comprehension. I gained confidence in my spoken German, which was previously my weakest skill, as I had not had much opportunity to practise. Grammatical concepts which I had previously understood but had to think through or work out on paper before speaking became more instinctive—I was developing a stronger ear for the rhythm and logic of the language. Although the course initially did not match my conception of an “intensive” immersion, by the end of it I found that my German had vastly improved, if in a more organic and less prescribed manner. In addition to daily 3 hour classes in the morning, the course also included 2-3 mandatory cultural outings per week in the afternoons, largely to museums or cultural sites where we went on guided tours in German. This was helpful for further developing auditory and reading comprehension, and also facilitated a more in-depth understanding of the history of the city beyond my specialisation in the interwar period, helping to materially contextualise my own research within a more expansive timeline.

Having moved from the A1 to B2 course in less than two years through the classes at Cambridge University Language Center, which meet only once per week throughout the academic year, I felt that I was always studying at a level ahead of my actual comprehension and fluency, grasping the grammatical concepts but struggling to develop a fluid command of the language. The exposure to and immersion within the German language enabled by the intensive course I took this summer has been invaluable for my learning trajectory, and I now feel that I can enter far more confidently into a C1 course this fall.

This immersive language study enhanced my ability to access archives and engage with my source materials. As my research examines the intersections between sexology and the interwar avant-gardes in Paris and Berlin, with a particular attention to photography as a common visual language between art and science, my research draws on artistic, medical, and queer historical archives. During my time in Berlin, I was able to make multiple visits to the Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft, the primary archive housing the remaining collection of the German sexologist and gay rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld, which had moved to updated premises and featured an expanded collection from when I had last visited two years ago. There I saw key sources in person, and discovered further sources I had not known of previously, which turned out to be some of the most fruitful. I was particularly excited to find a photograph by one of my avant-garde artistic case studies in an illustrated sexological encyclopaedia in Magnus Hirschfeld’s original library, further demonstrating the circulation of her photography within sexological spheres. The photograph was part of Germaine Krull’s series “Les Amies,” an avant-garde representation of an erotic interaction between a sapphic couple, and was presented alongside drawn and painted depictions of sapphic desire in the textbook. I also spent much of my time in the archives of the Schwules Museum, which holds copies of a vast collection of interwar sexological publications and illustrated periodicals targeted towards subsets of the queer community, as well as further materials from Hirschfeld’s Institute, including the documentation around a hormonal rejuvenation treatment that he developed and marketed called “Titus Pearls.” I was especially interested in the rhetorical and visual marketing of the drug, which appeared in both German and French illustrated magazines of the period, and often relied on before and after photos that represented the sexed body as both fallible and fixable through medical intervention.

I also visited the film archive of the Bundesarchiv, where I was able to view many key filmic sources, including Hirschfeld’s film “Anders als die Andern”, the first film to openly and sympathetically address same-sex desire, and the Austrian endocrinologist Eugene Steinach’s educational film about his hormonal research on the influence of sex glands on development. Drawing on the melodrama of expressionist film in the case of “Anders als die Andern,” or photomontage and animation in the case of “Der Steinach Film,” it was fascinating to see how these educational and scientific films were in conversation with the cinematic, and even avant-garde, visual languages of their time. As these archives are only open for limited hours, and some open for only one day each week or via restricted appointments, being in Berlin for an extended period of time was incredibly helpful to facilitate repeat visits and maximise my time in each archive.

I then went to Potsdam to present a paper on my research at the International Society for Cultural History Conference. This year’s theme was “Embodied Histories: Cultural History of, in, and through the Human Body.” The conference was very interdisciplinary, and I was pleased to find a strong presence of both Medical Historians and Art Historians—a rare combination of interlocutors, yet ideal for my interdisciplinary research interests! One of the keynote speakers, Prof. Änne Söll, was presenting on her recent research into a hand-drawn catalogue of sexual bathroom graffiti by the artist Rudolf Wacker, which she approached as a form of sexual ethnography contextualised within contemporary sexological practices. We’ve kept in touch, and I will be chairing a panel at a workshop on Queer Avant-gardes that she is running in Bochum in December.

The support of GHS funding was invaluable to my research pursuits this summer, enabling language learning, archival research, and academic networking opportunities that have proved key to the development of my doctoral work. I am very grateful, and look forward to remaining engaged with the society moving forward.

Ciaran Hervás (they/them) is a PhD student in the History of Art department at the University of Cambridge and a Harvard-UK Fellow on the Harvard Herchel Smith Scholarship. They received their A.B. in History & Literature from Harvard University in 2021, and their MPhil in Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2022. Their doctoral research examines the intersections between sexology and the artistic avant-garde in interwar Paris and Berlin, with a focus on photography as a common visual language between scientific and artistic spheres in the exploration of the sexed and gendered body.