Erica Passoni

Erica Passoni joined Princeton University’s German Department in the Fall of 2020. Before coming to Princeton, she received a BA in German Studies and in English and American Studies, as well as an MA in Medieval and Early Modern Studies from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg.

Her dissertation, “The Other Among Us: Early Modern German Discourses on Atypical Bodies, 1500–1770,”  offers the first comprehensive interdisciplinary study of early modern German religious, scientific, legal, and cultural responses to individuals with congenital physical variations, such as skeletal dysplasia, limb differences, and fused joints. She applies methodologies from Literary Studies, History of Science and Medicine, Disability Studies, and Anthropology to analyze the impact of theological and medical debates on monstrosity, marvel, deformity, and sin in shaping cultural understandings of embodied difference. Over time, these discourses defined bodily norms and influenced how societies assigned meaning to variations that fell outside of those norms.

Erica’s work has been supported by a Donald and Mary Hyde Academic-Year Fellowship for Research Abroad in the Humanities for 2024-25 and will be supported by a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year.

In addition to her studies, Erica has served as the Project Coordinator for Princeton University’s Environmental History Lab and as organizer of the Race Before Modernity Book Club for Princeton’s Program in Medieval Studies. She has also taught in primary and secondary schools as a German and English language instructor and educator for exchange students, refugees, children, and immigrant youth. During the academic year 2025–2026 she will be serving as a member of the SHARE Graduate Peers Program.

Articles:

- Passoni, Erica. “Bloodletting in the Latin West,” ed. Kristen Poole and Duncan Hardy, Routledge Resources Online ­– The Renaissance World (2025).

- Passoni, Erica. “New-World Wonders: German Ethnographic Encounters in the Early Modern Period,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. Forthcoming