Kyung-Ho Cha

Kyung-Ho Cha is Assistant Professor of German Literature at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He received his PhD in German Literature from the Technical University Berlin in 2008. His primary work is in the field of literature and science, focusing on evolutionary biology and the writings of Walter Benjamin. His book Human Mimicry: Poetics of Evolution (2010) explores the emergence and proliferation of the scientific myth of human mimicry in literature and the human sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The biological term mimicry originally describes the deceptive resemblance of an insect to another species or its environment. Around 1900 men of letters as well as biologists, physicians, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and sociologists probed the question of human mimicry and its function for societal coexistence: human beings are attributed the biological ability of perfectly adapting to their social environment to the point that they are physically and psychologically indiscernible from their peers. His current project, “Walter Benjamin and the History of Science,” analyzes the historical context of Benjamin's epistemology and pursues the question of whether his reflections on material culture and changing modes of perception can be methodically harnessed for a "Benjaminian" history of science.