Three new Goethe Fellows at the Forschungskolleg: Sabine Andresen, Beatrice Brunhöber, Cornelia Ebert
The President of Goethe University appointed three professors as Goethe Fellows at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften for the summer semester 2020: Sabine Andresen, social pedagogue and family researcher; Beatrice Brunhöber, legal scholar; and Cornelia Ebert, linguist. The Goethe Fellowship Programme will support these scholars in their development of new research projects and their applications for third-party funded research projects by providing them with the means and infrastructure to conduct preparatory workshops and conferences with collaborators from Germany and abroad and by integrating them into the international research and discussions being carried out at the Forschungskolleg.
The new Goethe Fellows and their projects
Sabine Andresen: »Violence in generational systems. Experiences, thematic approaches and processing«
Sabine Andresen has been a professor of social pedagogy and family research at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2011 and is chairperson of the Independent Commission for the Investigation of Sexual Child Abuse, which was founded in 2016 by resolution of the German Bundestag. In her research to date, she has dealt intensively with experiences of violence in childhood and with the question of what it means to deal with child sexual abuse in society. In her new project entitled »Violence in generational systems. Experiences, thematic approaches and processing«, she will deepen the theoretical, empirical and historical aspects of her previous research on experiences of violence. In doing so, she will examine both childhood and old age.
Beatrice Brunhöber: »The Law of Global Digitality«
Beatrice Brunhöber has been a professor of criminal law, criminal procedure, the philosophy of law and comparative law at Goethe University since 2019 and a principal investigator in the research network »Normative Orders« since 2018. Within the framework of her Goethe Fellowship project, she will expand her research project on »The Law of Global Digitality«. Her project asks whether and to what extent the abuse of digital power by companies like Google as well as the state can be prevented and how the emancipatory possibilities of the new information technologies can be strengthened within the legal system.
Cornelia Ebert: »Visual Communication«
Cornelia Ebert has been a professor of linguistics/semantics at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2019. Her research focuses in particular on the interface between semantics and pragmatics in language. The subject of her current project is visual communication, i.e. the gestures that accompany language and sign language. Ebert investigates the similarities and differences between phonetic-auditory and gestural-visual communication as well as the complex interplay between gestural and spoken language in particular. The aim of her study is not only to bring to light new insights into the nature of language, but also to find answers to the question of why gestures have been shown to play a prominent role in language acquisition and cognitive development.
The Goethe Fellowship Program and the Goethe Fellows at the Forschungskolleg
The Goethe Fellowship Program was initiated in 2017 by the Board of Directors of the Forschungskolleg in cooperation with the Executive Board of Goethe University. The aim is to promote outstanding research in the humanities as well as the internationalisation of research at Goethe University and to contribute to the research profile of the university. To this end, professors at the university who are working on the development of a new research topic are appointed to the Forschungskolleg as Goethe Fellows for a period of up to four years. The Goethe Fellows currently include: Iwo Amelung (sinology), Sabine Andresen (social pedagogy), Roland Borgards (literature), Beatrice Brunhöber (law), Christoph Burchard (law), Cornelia Ebert (linguistics), Guido Friebel (economics), Daniela Grunow (sociology), Sandra Seubert (political science), Astrid Wallrabenstein (law), Christian Wiese (Jewish philosophy of religion).