Fever has long been a threatening and inescapable feature of the human condition; as the German poet Friedrich Hebbel noted in 1860, “He who would live must hazard the fever.” For centuries, “fever” denoted a disease marked by various sensations – heat, but also an altered pulse, or delirium. Only from the 1840s onward was fever reduced to quantifiable temperature, and reframed as a symptom of diverse diseases, which from the late 1800s onward came to be associated with specific pathogens. Today, the re-emergence of old and the emergence of new infectious diseases rank among the principal challenges facing humankind. This multidisciplinary summer school brings together perspectives from the life and natural sciences as well as the humanities to re-examine the multifaceted nature of fever.

Topics include epidemics and pandemics of febrile illnesses; their prevention, including vaccines and their societal acceptance (or resistance); the sensory register of fever, including but exceeding heat and temperature, e.g. its production, theorisation, and effects on the body; disease causation, e.g. through pathogens and vectors; and febrile sequelae, post-acute infectious syndromes, and the narratives of sufferers unable to fully recover from febrile infectious diseases. Taken together, these approaches invite a renewed reckoning with fever as both a biological phenomenon and a social and cultural object.

The program includes:
- a poster session and networking dinner on the first day
- a social event
- hands-on tutorials with a focus on applications
- sessions combining theoretical perspectives with practical examples

Speakers:
- Jan Stühmer (HITS, KIT) – Introduction to GNNs, including a practical session, and Equivariance as Design Principle in Modern Machine Learning
- Ismail Ilkan Ceylan (TU Vienna, AITHYRA) – Graph Foundation Models
- Joel Oskarsson (ETH) – GNNs for Spatio-Temporal Modelling and Earth System Modelling
- Arghya Bhowmik (DTU) – GNNs for Material Sciences