Katrin Wehling-Giorgi reflects on a day of interdisciplinary dialogue at Durham’s Institute for Medical Humanities, 27 March 2026.
Can we ‘inherit’ our ancestors’ lived experience of trauma? If trauma can be passed on to the next generation, where does this leave our agency to step outside of the shadows of the past, and how do we avoid the pitfalls of biological determinism? What does intergenerationally transmitted trauma feel like in our bodies?
In her memoir Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther, 2014), the Ukrainian-German writer Katja Petrowskaja describes being ‘hit by a bullet that was never fired off’. She goes on to relate the affective dimension of trauma that has been passed along the family line (without being directly experienced by herself) as a ‘bolt of lightning, a sudden swoon, throwing [her] off balance and leaving [her] gasping for breath’ (Petrowskaja 2018, 15). Her body seems to ‘remember’ the traumatic experiences of her ancestors that haunt her as the descendant of a family marked by persecution and loss during the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
Epigenetics — broadly defined as the study of how lived experience can alter gene expression and transmit those changes to the next generation — is exploring biologically what literature has long intuited: that our parents and grandparents’ experiences do not stay with them alone. There is increasing scientific evidence that they silently travel into the bodies of those who come after (Tobi et al. 2009; Yehuda et al. 2018). The scientific evidence for this remains largely correlational – causality has yet to be demonstrated – but it is growing (Banushi et al. 2025). It is precisely in the space of scientific uncertainty and methodological constraints that literature becomes a powerful tool: where data-centric methods require ‘clean’ experimental conditions and struggle to account for the contextual, relational dimension of traumatic experience, narrative can ‘translate’ intergenerational trauma into affective and culturally specific forms that are often missing from scientific approaches.
It was the productive convergence between literature and science that lay at the heart of World Literature and Epigenetics: Women Narrating Transgenerational Trauma, a conference held at Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities on 27 March 2026. The event brought together literary scholars, psychologists, anthropologists, and writers to discuss the intersections and productive dialogue between epigenetics, trauma, and multilingual narratives.
The day began, fittingly, not with a paper but with objects. Participants brought items connected to their research as prompts for self-introduction – a reminder, early and deliberately, that knowledge can be produced and shared in ways that traditional academic forms do not always make room for. What followed was a series of conversations that kept returning to the same knot of questions. How does intergenerational trauma live in the body? How do narrative forms — fragmented, recursive, multilingual — give shape to lived experience of trauma? And what does it mean, ethically, politically, and scientifically, that suffering can be inherited?
On the literary side, contributions explored how women’s narratives of embodied trauma provide powerful counter-archives, filling the gaps that official, documented history leaves out. What emerged was a sense of writing trauma as an inherently communicative, relational act — whether through the letter form, the transcription of orally transmitted stories, or the labour of ‘translating’ a shared family past into words. While the writer acts as the scribe of an undocumented past, the mother figures in much of this work as the living repository of microhistory and alternative knowledge. Katrin Wehling-Giorgi and Tiziana de Rogatis reflected on how the articulation of trauma becomes a form of postcolonial counternarrative that gives a voice to those conventionally silenced, and how the female creative act can itself be a recuperation of agency (de Rogatis et al. 2025; Wehling-Giorgi 2023). Hannie Lawlor traced how trauma disrupts linear storytelling, producing ‘traumatic loops’ and fragmented, recursive forms in which silenced conversations resurface and disrupt the lines of power that sustain single, authoritative narrations — opening up, in the process, spaces in which the traumatised subject can begin to reclaim agency (Lawlor 2024).
A highlight of the day was the public conversation with Igiaba Scego, the award-winning Italian-Somali novelist whose work has brought the silenced histories of colonial Somalia into the heart of contemporary Italian literature. Scego’s latest work Cassandra a Mogadiscio (2023; Cassandra in Mogadishu), in fact, features the key word Jirro — Somali for illness — which condenses the forms of displacement, loss, and embodied memory across languages and generations. Scego underlined her view of female creativity — chiefly channelled through the maternal figure — as an inherently generative, future-oriented practice that not only articulates trauma but brings about archival recovery, care and healing.
Clare Hanson brought a timely caution to the afternoon. Epigenetics, she reminded us, still falls short of evidencing causation, and its findings can be mobilised politically in ways that risk biological determinism and ethnocentric assumptions of traumatic experience. The focus on individual bodies (‘molecular’ trauma; Keaney et al. 2023), in fact, risks displacing attention from ongoing structural violence. And yet Hanson also pointed to the power of narrative to effectively communicate epigenetic findings and placing them within a wider context of restorative justice (Hanson 2020).
Turning to scientific approaches, Nadja Reissland then offered a striking illustration of transmissions at work: through the remarkable medium of 4D ultrasound imaging, she showed how maternal mental health shapes prenatal behaviour in ways that persist after birth, though the causal pathways remain incompletely understood (Reissland et al. 2021). Finally, drawing on oral history alongside epigenetic analysis to explore the intergenerational transmission of Partition trauma, Sana Saboowala highlighted the need for an interdisciplinary, nuanced approach: epigenetics is one component among many in a layered, multidirectional process of embodiment, and community-based, mixed-methods research is essential if we are to engage with it responsibly.
What emerged, across the day, was not a single answer to our questions but rather a growing awareness that intergenerational trauma transmission is a dynamic, complex process. Further study will require careful interdisciplinary, multilevel inquiry that challenges the stubborn gap between the discourses of science and culture — though that bridge must be built with caution and nuance. While epigenetic studies have opened a new window onto how environmental factors and experience can influence the next generation, epigenetic determinism risks hardening existing inequalities, reading inherited trauma as biological fate rather than as a call for systemic change. Literary narratives rooted in oral history and complex relationality, by contrast, can restore the specificities of lived experience and cultural context that data-driven approaches tend to flatten. At the same time, the neuroplasticity on which epigenetics is premised comes with a new economy of hope: some epigenetic effects may be reversible, and social networks, strong communities, and creative production are emerging as powerful pathways toward recovery and restorative justice for marginalised groups.
The conference was generously supported by the ILCS Conference Grant Scheme, the Society of Italian Studies, and the Violence, Trauma and Memory Research Group based at Durham’s Institute for Medical Humanities. The full recording is available via the Institute for Medical Humanities website.
Note: This event includes discussion of intergenerational and transgenerational trauma, including in the contexts of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution, postcolonial violence and its ongoing legacies, indigenous dispossession, war and political violence. Some material engages with first- and second-hand accounts of loss, persecution, forced migration, and bodily suffering. Readers who may find this material distressing are encouraged to engage with it at their own pace and to seek support if needed.
About the author
Katrin Wehling-Giorgi is Professor of Italian Studies and Co-Director of Durham’s Institute for Medical Humanities, where she co-leads the Research Group ‘Trauma, Memory, Violence’. Her latest research focuses on intergenerationally transmitted trauma in contemporary women’s writing, with a specific focus on the productive entanglements between epigenetics and the hidden experience of trauma.
References
Banushi, Blerida, Jemma Collova, and Helen Milroy. 2025. “Epigenetic Echoes: Bridging Nature, Nurture, and Healing across Generations.” International Journal of Molecular Sciences 26, no. 7: 3075. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms26073075.
de Rogatis, Tiziana, and Andreina Sgaglione. 2025. “Narrative Medicine, Health Literacy, and the Archive of Migration Traumas and Translingualism in Igiaba Scego’s Cassandra in Mogadishu”. Testo e Senso, vol. 1, n. 29, pp. 163-82. doi:10.58015/2036-2293/788.
Hanson, Clare. 2020. Genetics and the Literary Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Petrowskaja, Katja. 2018. Maybe Esther. Translated by Shelley Frisch. 4th Estate.
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Rogers-LaVanne, Mary P., Alyssa C. Bader, Alida de Flamingh, Sana Saboowala, Chuck Smythe, Bernadine Atchison, Nathan Moulton, et al. “Association between Gene Methylation and Experiences of Historical Trauma in Alaska Native Peoples.” International Journal for Equity in Health 22, no. 1 (September 8, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-023-01967-7.
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Tobi, Elmar W., L.H. Lumey, Rudolf P. Talens, Dennis Kremer, Hein Putter, Aryeh D. Stein, P. Eline Slagboom, and Bastiaan T. Heijmans. 2009. “DNA Methylation Differences after Exposure to Prenatal Famine Are Common and Timing- and Sex-Specific.” Human Molecular Genetics 18, no. 21: 4046–53. https://doi.org/10.1093/hmg/ddp353.
Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin. 2023. “Unspeakable Things Spoken: Transgenerational Trauma, Fractured Bodies and Visual Tropes in Toni Morrison, Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante’s Works.” Romance Studies 41, no. 4: 248–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/02639904.2024.2311516.
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