WISAG prize 2025 for Mara Linden’s dissertation on Global Health in Crisis (June 2025)
Mara Linden with Prof. Dr. Peter Lindner (middle), Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Bender, President of Freunde und Förderer der Goethe-Universität, Dr. Ulrich Breuer, Chancellor Goethe University (right), and WISAG representatives (left). Photo: Uwe Dettmar.
Earlier this year, I (Mara Linden) received Goethe University Frankfurt’ WISAG prize 2025 for my dissertation titled “Global Health in Crisis? Global Health Politics between Economic Rationality, Securitisation and Emergency Response”.
The WISAG prize is awarded once a year to the best dissertation in the humanities and social sciences, focusing on processes and conditions for societal coherence. The award includes prize money of 5,000 euros and has first been funded by WISAG founder Claus Wissler († 2023) in 2008. The prize is awarded by Goethe University’s alumni association Freunde und Förderer der Goethe-Universität e.V. at their annual academic award ceremony, which this year took place in June in Goethe University’s Casino building.
It is a great recognition to receive this award for my dissertation which I concluded at the Department of Human Geography at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2024, supervised there by Prof. Dr. Peter Lindner. In the dissertation, I analyse the political field of global health and foreign policy in Germany. My research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the German Federal Foreign Office, where I stayed between 2020 and 2021 – unexpectedly during the pandemic. At the centre of my analysis is the emergence of a political field of global health at the German Federal Foreign Office since the 2010s. My work also scrutinises the changes induced by Covid-19 and new and varied challenges, conflicts and capacities. Looking closer at the case study of vaccine donations, I outline the unequal conditions of vaccine distribution and global health more generally, especially between Global North and South.
Currently, I am a research associate in the Cultural Geography working group at the Institute of Geography at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In part, I am continuing to work on global health and foreign policy, with the corresponding book to my disseration, titled “Global Health in Crisis? Security, Foreign Policy and Covid-19 in Germany”, is set to be published with Routledge in November 2025.
