Till van Rahden Professor for German and European Studies, Université de Montréal Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: mid-April to mid-August 2026 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Forms, Style and Manners: Democracy as a Way of Life« Project outline: Concerns over the future viability of democracy pervade scholarly and public controversies. Today, the social sciences dominate the domain of democratic theory. In contrast, the humanities have contributed comparatively little to our understanding of democracy’s fragile and contingent nature in the past and in the present. In his current work, Till van Rahden aims to strengthen the role of the humanities in scholarly exchanges over the meaning, the fragility and the contingency of democracy as a way of life. He aims to encourage conversations about the democratic content of aesthetic forms, styles, and manners. Drawing on anecdotal episodes of postwar Germans’ search for democracy, the project explores the democratic content of aesthetic forms, styles, and manners. (Till van Rahden) Research partner: Till van Rahden is visiting the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften as a Mercator Fellow of the Research Training Group »Aesthetics of Democracy« at the invitation of Johnnaes Voelz, professor of American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Scholarly profile of Till van RahdenTill van Rahden teaches Modern and Contemporary history at the Université de Montréal. From 2006 to 2016 he held the Canada Research Chair in German and European Studies at the Université de Montréal. He has been a research fellow at »Leibniz Institute for European History«, Mainz, the »Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen«, Vienna, and the »Graduate Institute«, Geneva. He specializes in European history since the Enlightenment and is interested in the tension between the elusive promise of democratic equality and the recurrent presence of cultural diversity and moral conflicts. Till van Rahden regularly contributes to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and cultural journals such as the Merkur, the Neue Rundschau, and the Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte.Till van Rahden at academia Till van Rahden at orcid Selected publications:
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