Joseph Medley

Joseph Medley (he/him) is a non-traditional student studying German literature at the University of Illinois. Before earning his undergraduate, Joseph was an active-duty, non-commissioned officer in the U.S. Air Force in charge of a data-analysis shop. After leaving the military, he studied German, French, biology, and chemistry at the University of New Mexico. His German, undergraduate thesis explored conformity and subservience in Wilhelmine Germany through Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan, serialized before the first World War and fully published in 1918, after the war.

Before graduate school, Joseph spent six years as a cave geomicrobiologist responsible for field work, lab work, electron microscopy, and bioinformatics under Dr. Diana Northup at the University of New Mexico. He focused on the astrobiological implications of cave speleothems as potential biosignatures for Martian rovers, effects of wildfires on cave ecologies, and White-Nose Syndrome (a fungal disease devastating bat populations). This research has allowed him to collaborate with German scientists out of Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Technische Hochschule Nürnberg, in the field, deep underground, on the island of Hawaiʻi.

Joseph’s background has led him to believe that the humanities have a lot to teach us about what we think we know about fields, like medicine, steeped heavily in the natural sciences. The 18th century is especially interesting in that it was both a time of rapid industrial and scientific innovation and also a time characterized by a growing separation of the arts and sciences within academia – something made especially interesting in the modern era as we see researchers slowly, albeit oftentimes reluctantly, realizing the absolute necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration.