Otta Wenskus

Otta Wenskus (born 29 May 1955, in Marburg/Lahn) is a German classical philologist currently residing in Austria.

Wenskus, daughter of historian Reinhard Wenskus, studied Classical philology and linguistics at the Universities of Göttingen, Florence, and Lausanne. She acquired her Ph.D. in Göttingen in 1982. In 1985/86 she was maître de conférences at the University of Caen, and in 1987 Visiting Scholar at the Institute of the History of Mathematics at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

She passed her habilitation in 1988. During the summer terms of 1990 and 1992 she was a guest professor at the Universities of Osnabrück and Jena respectively and, from 1990 to 1994, a Heisenberg scholar until her appointment as a full professor at the University of Innsbruck.

Her topics include history of science, particularly medicine and astronomy, linguistics, particularly code switching, gender studies, Latin epistolography, Dante, and the reception of classical antiquity in fantasy and science fiction, particularly Star Trek.