KWI NEWS 4/2023

+ Luzie Metzdorf studied history, French, and art history at the Philipps University in Marburg (BA), and Culture Language Media (MA) at the European University in Flensburg. Her research interests include economic and corporate history, as well as Flensburg's colonial history. She is the initiator of the free PokoFL app: the digital postcolonial city walk Flensburg. As of August 2023, she is a research assistant at KWI and soon-to-be PhD student at the University of Duisburg-Essen with a project on the history of the Burda family business in the 20th century.

+ Justin Begley is a literary and intellectual historian whose research interests lie in the relationship between poetry and natural philosophy, animal and plant studies, manuscript cultures, and the history of the life sciences. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2017, and he is currently at the University of Basel, where he is pursuing his habilitation project. The project that he will focus on as an international fellow at KWI explores ideas about plants and vegetality in the English- and German-speaking worlds in the decades around 1700.

+ Tom Allen completed his PhD in 2021, and he has held positions at the University of Sussex, Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle, the University of Paris Nanterre, and the American University of Paris. He has published on contemporary anglophone poetry, Critical Theory, and European cinema. He will use his time as an international fellow at KWI to work on his first monograph, entitled Care for Trapped Things: Literature and the Critique of Insurance, and to develop a second project on radical form within the poetry of the French left.

+ Morten Paul is a literary and cultural scholar and received his PhD from the University of Konstanz. He researches theory production and circulation, the history of the humanities, and the history of publishing in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on the Federal Republic of Germany. From 2017 to 2023, he worked as a nonfiction and academic editor at August Verlag, and at Verlag Matthes & Seitz Berlin. At KWI, he is developing a new research project investigating the relationship between political economy and psychology, as well as attempts to synthesize psychoanalytic theorizing and the critique of political economy.

+ Morgan Robinson Flow is a historian of eastern Africa and the history of science, focused on the 19th and 20th centuries. She received her PhD from Princeton University in 2018, and she is currently an assistant professor in the Department of History at Mississippi State University. As an international fellow at KWI, she plans to continue research for her second book project, tentatively titled Making an African University: Histories of Inquiry in East Africa.

+ Jonas Levin Schmidt studied history and literature in Freiburg, Dublin, and Berlin. As a doctoral student at KWI, he will work on a project that aims to broaden our understanding of the cultural, social, and epistemological processes that have shaped historiography on Nazism and the Holocaust since the 1970s.

+ Evelyn Runge (Thyssen@KWI fellow) heads projects on the digital image at the Institute for Media Culture and Theatre at the University of Cologne. She received her PhD in political theory from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. She is a graduate of the VII Masterclass in Arles of the photo agency VII, and she trained as an editor at the German School of Journalism in Munich. Her research focusses on photojournalism, media ethics, digital image cultures, and visual ethnography, with a particular interest in the intersections of politics and society as well as theory and practice.

Writer Judith Hermann visited Essen on 21 September, kicking off her fall reading tour. In a well-attended event at the Forum Kreuzeskirche, moderated by minister Ulf Steidel, she spoke with Anja Schürmann about her current book, Wir hätten uns alles gesagt (S. Fischer 2023). In November Judith Hermann will be awarded this year's Wilhelm Raabe Preis for the book, the jury announced this week.

Our dynamic annual theme “More or Less” continues for a second semester starting this fall, with a range of promising events and a number of exciting guests. Kicking things off, October brings a book premiere with Friedrich Lenger’s new global history of capitalism and a panel discussion on the challenges of advising for doctoral students. You can find all upcoming events and more information here.

On 6 July 2023, David Lauer (Kiel University, CAU) gave a lecture entitled “Mehr oder weniger Autorschaft: Postauktoriales Schreiben, Denken und Gestalten in Zeiten von Chat GPT 3 und Stable Diffusion” (More or Less Authorship: Post-authorial Writing, Thinking, and Shaping in the Time of Chat GPT 3 and Stable Diffusion). This event was part of the KWI 2023/2024 annual theme “More or Less”, and also part of the series “Wenn und Aber. Philosophische Fragen zur Zeit” (Ifs, Ands, Buts: Philosophical Questions on Time), a cooperation between KWI and the Folkwang University of the Arts.

DLF Nova broadcast the lecture in the “Hörsaal” programme on 15 September.

“Latenz der Liste. Ordnung und Störung in der organisierten Sterbebegleitung”

by Niklas Barth

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“Ludwig Erhards zweite Karriere. Zur politischen Mythologie des Neoliberalismus ‘nach dem Boom’” by Flemming Falz

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Figures of Radical Absence: Blanks and Voids in Theory, Literature, and the Arts by Alexandra Irimia

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Narcotic Cities: Counter-Cartographies of Drugs and Spaces edited by Stefan Höhne, Mélina Germes, and Luise Klaus

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“Zur Schulbildung um Ferdinand Tönnies: Annäherungen an einen Personenzusammenhang”

by Sebastian Klauke and Alexander Wierzock

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“Defining Nothingness: Kazimir Malevich and Religious Renaissance” by Tatiana Levina

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“Der kleine Prinz der Systemtheorie” by Danilo Scholz

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“L’hegelo-marxismo di Kojève. Una provocazione filosofica in un paesaggio ideologico in ebollizione” by Danilo Scholz

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“Of Fast and Slow Pages: Movement in the Photobook” by Anja Schürmann

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