Skin is the body’s largest organ. It feels heat, cold, pain, and pleasure in a tactile sense but also reveals hidden emotions by reacting with goose bumps, blushes, rashes, and sweat. Skin is the permeable border between the inside and outside of our bodies: Fluids leave the body via its skin and bacteria and viruses enter it through the skin. Much more than a physical feature, though, skin is a contact zone between self and the surrounding world. People read our identity and history through our skin color and through the stories that wrinkles, scars, burns, wounds, lacerations or tattoos and skin aesthetics tell. In artistic practices and representations, skin becomes a medium, a surface, a canvas and art object for exploring and transforming identities. Skin is an ambiguous, liminal, and malleable marker of personal and collective identity as I will show in my talk. Inextricably, skin is always both, a border as well as a surface, a mirror and a mask, a physical, material entity as well as a cultural sign. It is used as a marker of both permanent and malleable identity, it renders the past as well as the present and sometimes survives the death of the body as an object of art. I will sketch the multi-facetted cultural symbolics of skin and look at some cultural practices as well as some examples of literary and artistic representations of skin.

Caroline Rosenthal is Professor of American Literature at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena. She has published on Comparative North American Studies; Canadian literature, culture, and literary theory; city fiction and spatial theory; as well as on present day reverberations of Romantic ideas and practices, especially on Henry David Thoreau. Most recently her research has focused on Ecocriticism, Nature Writing, and the Blue Humanities. Caroline Rosenthal is a founding member of the DFG-funded Graduate Training School „The Romantic Modell“ (2015-2024) and of the “Thuringian Water Innovation Cluster” (2022-2025).

Her publications include: Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone, (ed. with Dirk Vanderbeke), Cambridge Scholars 2015. Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene (ed. with Gina Comos), Cambridge Scholars 2019, Writing Water in Classic American Literature, (ed. with Kerstin Knopf) Special Issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 73:2 (2025) The Blue Humanities, (ed. with Hanna Masslich) Special Issue of Wissenschaft Literatur und Unterricht, 2025: 2.