Science goes pop: where mad scientists meet the world

Dr Anna-Sophie Jürgens has run away with the circus – figuratively, of course.

Born to artist parents with a childhood in East Germany, it’s no wonder she has the oomph when it comes to bridging the gap between science and pop culture.

“I have always been interested in extreme characters in pop culture, including mad clowns, performers and scientists, and the interface between science and art,” she says.

“Growing up, I was surrounded by art history, literature and science. My parents focused on book illustration and graphic art with scientific themes.”

Jürgens has followed her interests throughout her career and has studied cultural history and comparative literature, focusing on French and Russian philology. She is fluent in German, French and English and has travelled to more than 46 countries. Jürgens credits her can-do attitude to a two-month journey from Moscow to Siberia, where it was minus 41 degrees.

“After that, nothing seemed impossible,” she says.

While working on her master’s thesis about the links between mythology and acrobatics in French fiction, Jürgens uncovered the research gap in the intersection of circus, science and technology, which led her to complete a PhD.

“Circuses around the 1900s were major cultural institutions that used cutting-edge technology,” Jürgens says.

“They had sword fights with electric weapons and were fantastically influential.”

She continues to be drawn to the circus, which inspired her to publish two books on the topic: Circus, science and technology and Circus and the avant-gardes.

She began her journey at ANU on a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Now a senior lecturer at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Jürgens ensures that the University is ahead of the game when it comes to science, art and popular entertainment. As the founder of the ANU science in pop culture and entertainment hub, Popsicule, Jürgens is our muse inspiring the public imagination about science.

In addition to publishing on science in comics and penning her latest book, Communicating ice through popular art and aesthetics, Jürgens juggles her side acts with the same vigour and zest as the fictional scientists she researches. As a translator between the sciences and humanities, she helps ANU scientists get creative with their communication through street art and augmented reality. She curates the ‘Science.Art.Film.’ screenings at the National Film and Sound Archive and runs science and humour courses.

Humour, she stresses, is one of the most powerful tools in science, communication and pop culture. The comical way fictional characters such as Beetlejuice and the Joker carry out their dastardly schemes can reveal much about society’s ideas about science.

“When the Joker turns others into clowns through virology or biochemistry, it makes us reflect on our cultural ideas and attitudes towards science, if not our fears and desires for our scientific and technological,” Jürgens says.

“My favourite pop culture story is that of the intricate, polarising, even confronting relationship between science and humour.”