News from the Forschungskolleg
Three new Goethe Fellows at the Forschungskolleg: Frederike Middelhoff, Darrel Moellendorf, Guido Pfeifer
In cooperation with the Office of the President of Goethe University, the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften has appointed three university professors to be Goethe Fellows for the summer semester 2022: the literary studies scholar Frederike Middelhoff, the philosopher and political theorist Darrel Moellendorf and the legal historian Guido Pfeifer.
The Goethe Fellowship Program will support the scholars in developing new research projects and applying for externally-funded research projects by providing them with the means and infrastructure to conduct preparatory workshops and conferences with partners from Germany and abroad, and by integrating them into the context of international exchange and research at the Forschungskolleg.
The new Goethe Fellows and their projects
Frederike Middelhoff: »Romanticism and Migration. A History of Knowledge«Frederike Middelhoff has been professor of modern German literature with a focus on romantic studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2020. Her current research project is about migration around 1800 – a time when reflection on migration and flight became very important in Europe, not least in light of the Napoleonic Wars and the wave of emigration overseas. Middelhoff examines, on the one hand, the aesthetic representation of emigration, flight, and exile in the literature and art of romanticism. On the other hand, she investigates how migration was negotiated socio-politically, economically and scientifically and how the concept of migration found its way into other fields of knowledge – for example, into zoology, which dealt with the migration of animals, or into medicine, which addressed the migration of particles and pathogens. With her interdisciplinary research project, Middelhoff will contribute to a history of the culture and knowledge of migration on the threshold of modernity.
Darrel Moellendorf: »Hope for Human Prospects in the Anthropocene Era«
Darrel Moellendorf has been Professor of International Political Theory and Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2013. His research project concerns the outlook for humanity in the era of the Anthropocene, an era of pervasive human impact on planetary systems. Humanity has flourished over the last 11,000 years of relative climatic and planetary stability, the Holocene era. The Anthropocene threatens that stability and therefore the natural conditions of human flourishing. This threat is a source of considerable anxiety, and responding to it requires unprecedented international cooperation in order to ensure the sustainability and resilience of both our valued institutions of liberal democracy and the achievements of culture and science. Kant’s question, asked back in the 18th century, remains relevant to the Anthropocene. For what may we hope? Moellendorf’s research develops philosophical conceptions of hope, solidarity, sustainability, and resilience that are relevant to the threats of the Anthropocene, and that can inform both politics and institutional design.
Guido Pfeifer: »Identification and Integration between Law and Religion: Everyday Legal Life of Jewish Exile and Diaspora Communities in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 1st Millennium BCE«
Guido Pfeifer has been professor of ancient legal history, of the history of European private law and of civil law at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2007. His (legal) historical-philological research project is guided by the question of the extent to which legal systems can provide a common normative framework for social groups of different ethnic, religious or other backgrounds in a foreign environment. To this end, Pfeifer is concerned with documentary texts that originated in exiled Jewish communities and in communities of Jewish Diaspora in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 1st millennium BCE, the so-called »Al Yahudu Tablets« and the »Elephantine Papyri«. The Al Yahudu Tablets are cuneiform clay tablets in the Akkadian language in which marriage and inheritance records as well as legal and property disputes are documented; the papyri written in Aramaic deal with religious practices of the time. Both groups of texts have not yet been exhaustively studied from the perspective of legal history. Above all, however, they provide a direct insight into the everyday life of Jewish law in antiquity.
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.
Goethe Fellows in the summer semester 2022
Sabine Andresen (social pedagogy), Beatrice Brunhöber (law), Christoph Burchard (law), Cornelia Ebert (linguistics), Gunther Hellmann (political science), Guido Friebel (economics), Frederike Middelhoff (literary studies), Darrel Moellendorf (philosophy/political theory), Guido Pfeifer (law), Ömer Özsoy (Islamic theology), Sandra Seubert (political science) und Zhiyi Yang (sinology).
Former Goethe Fellows
Iwo Amelung (sinology), Roland Borgards (literary studies), Daniela Grunow (sociology), Astrid Wallrabenstein (law) and Christian Wiese (Jewish philosophy of religion).