M.A. Sophia Rossmann

Doctoral Candidate

Sophia studied sociology, philosophy, communication science and psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid (graduated 2018). In her master’s thesis, she analysed narratives of individual responsibility and forms of subjectivation with regard to the discussion of epigenetic knowledge in German daily newspapers. Since October 2018, she is a doctoral candidate and research associate in Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller’s team at the chair of Science and Technology Policy (MCTS) of the Technical University of Munich. In her dissertation, she focuses on processes of epigenetic knowledge production in the field of environmental toxicology.

Sophia works as a research associate in the project “Situating Environmental Epigenetics. A Comparative, Actor-Centered Study of Environmental Epigenetics as an Emergent Research Approach in Three Research Fields”, funded by the DFG and led by Prof. Ruth Müller. The project comparatively studies how approaches from environmental epigenetics are adopted and adapted in three research fields of great relevance for public health (nutritional epidemiology, environmental toxicology, and the pathophysiology of mood & anxiety) and examines the social and political opportunities and challenges this new knowledge might entail.

Currently, she is interested in how epigenetic research on toxicants reconfigures the notion of toxicity as procedural and relational, particularly focusing on the placenta as an emerging epistemic object in the field to make toxicity visible.

Dissertation project

  • Feminist STS
  • Knowledge cultures and new ontologies in the life sciences
  • Biopolitics and biomedicine
  • Human-Environment Relations
  • Theories of subjectification

  • Rossmann, Sophia (2021). Going Virtual: The ethnographic gaze in pandemic times. EASST Review, 40(1), 29-32.

→ Current Courses

  • STS-STEM Mentorship, seminar (SS2021)
  • STS 1: Practices and Politics of Science and Technology, seminar (WS 2020/2021)
  • Herausforderungen der Biomedizin. Soziale, Politische und Ethische Dimensionen der Medizinischen Biologie [Challenges of Biomedicine. Social, Political and Ethical Dimensions of Medical Biology], seminar (SS2020)
  • Who Is Responsible for Environment and Health? Social and Cultural Perspective on Environment, Health, and Technology, seminar (WS2019/20; WS 2020/2021)
  • Academic Skills, seminar (WS 2019/2020)
  • Fachspezifische Qualifikation in Aktuellen Themen der Biologie [Subject-specific qualification in current topics in biology], lecture series (SS2019; SS2020)
  • STS 1: Practices and Politics of Science and Technology, tutorial (WS 2018/2019)

  • Rossmann, Sophia & Müller, Ruth (2020). Toxic Entanglements. Reconfiguring Toxicity in Environmental Epigenetic Research. EASST-4S Conference, virPrague.
  • Müller, Ruth; Rossmann, Sophia; Samaras, Georgia (2019). Situating Environmental Epigenetics: Tracing Field-Specific Configuration of Environmental Epigenetics in Three Biomedical Research Fields. 4S Conference, New Orleans, US.