Research
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Research profile of the Faculty of Humanities
The Faculty's highly differentiated humanities culture has led to a diverse research landscape. We see this breadth of topics and methods, which cannot be reduced to a few key concepts, as a distinguishing feature of our research culture.
Agile research design formats are characteristic of this. In contrast to tightly pre-planned and therefore seemingly externally determined large-scale projects or highly complex and therefore sluggish collaborative research apparatuses, they are based on individually manageable, almost non-hierarchical and therefore quickly responsive structures. Such lean architectures, which are appropriate for the advanced 21st century, ensure that the research capacities of FB 02 are not blocked by extensive application, Coordinator or reporting tasks, but benefit scientific and social progress almost undiminished. Modern principles such as the careful use of given research resources, strict problem-oriented interdisciplinarity or internal structural economy are guiding principles for the targeted and therefore effective research culture of the Faculty of Humanities.
Nevertheless, the Faculty is also involved in two university-wide research priorities in which several of its subject areas collaborate across departments and disciplines: in Cultural and Gender Studies and in Empirical Educational Research. Other areas of focus include „Textwissenschaft und Textkompetenz“, „Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung“ and research into the work and influence of the Brothers Grimm.
Main research areas at FB 02
Publications of the Faculty
David Römer / Steffen Pappert / Kersten Sven Roth (eds.): Zivilgesellschaftliche Linguistik . Hamburg: Buske (Language - Politics - Society 36), 2025.
Without a deeper understanding of language, social reality and relationships cannot be described. This volume documents the development of linguistics dedicated to the public use of language and provides theoretical, methodological and empirical insights into the study of social discourse.
Gisa Bauer / Susanne Schuster (eds.): Handbuch der Geschichte der Frauenordination in den aus der Reformation hervorgegangenen Kirchen. With the collaboration of Johanna Herbst. Tübingen: Narr Verlag 2025.
The history of women's ordination in the churches that emerged from the Reformation is made up of a wealth of stories of women's ordination. Every Protestant regional church and every free church in Germany has promoted and implemented the equality of women and men in the ministry from different perspectives, in different time periods and at different stages.
For the first time, this handbook presents these histories side by side in their entirety and offers scholars, interested laypeople and church employees an overview of the developments towards women's ordination in all regional churches and free churches in Germany.
The stories of women's ordination are preceded by articles on the equality of women and men from the perspective of theological and religious studies disciplines. The individual articles are written by experts who are familiar with the respective regional and church specifics.
Manuel García Serrano
El Quijote en la mudanza de la Edad Moderna (y otros ensayos filosóficos sobre ficción y narración)
Edition Reichenberger, Kassel 2023.
Los ocho trabajos aquí recopilados pueden ser leídos de forma independiente, pero comparten temas y preguntas, y confluyen en una misma línea metódica. Al universo del Quijote le es dispensada una atención especial. En el primer capítulo del presente libro se revisa una serie de lecturas ya clásicas del espíritu moderno de la novela cervantina, y se propone una alternativa a las conclusiones que de ellas se desprenden. En el capítulo que sigue, el Quijote sirve de atalaya para dar aviso de analogías y disparidades entre narrativa ficcional e historiografía seria: tema este de un debate prolongado hasta hoy tanto en la teoría de la literatura como en la filosofía de la historia. El tercer ensayo constituye una meditación sobre la cimentación dialógica, en el Siglo de Oro, de un realismo antiescéptico, en cuyo seno las ofuscaciones de don Quijote, con su encaje narrativo, al cabo coadyuvan a orillar escollos epistemológicos. Las inquietantes novelas de Javier Marías iluminan en el ensayo posterior una soterrada trabazón de la estética narrativa con la fundamentación moral, y conducen a una enmienda de los términos en que se plantean las disputas corrientes al respecto. A la naturaleza de la interpretación es dedicada alguna cavilación en todos los capítulos; pero particularmente en los dos siguientes se para la consideración en centrales problemas hermenéuticos. Una rápida evocación crítica de algunas paradigmáticas tramas fabulosas, así como una revisión más detenida, ya en el capítulo posterior, del cine surrealista de Buñuel y del teatro de García Lorca prestan refuerzo a los argumentos esgrimidos. Los dos capítulos finales tercian, por último, en una controversia aún candente en torno a la idea de una identidad personal narrativamente configurada y a sus condicionamientos intersubjetivos. Junto con los grandes nombres de la literatura áurea, que gravitan sobre el entero libro, Miguel de Unamuno y Roberto Bolaño son los autores a cuyas penetrantes ejemplificaciones ahí se recurre para una reconstrucción de ideas de Kant y Hegel.
Ilse Müllner: 2 Samuel 11-24 (Herders theological commentary on the Old Testament), Freiburg/Br. and others 2025.
The most up-to-date commentary on 2 Samuel
In Israel's culture of remembrance, the beginnings of kingship set the course for political history. David is the main figure in the Second Book of Samuel. But other figures in the biblical narrative are also deeply inscribed in the cultural memory of Jewish and Christian societies, such as Bathsheba and Uriah or Absalom. The impressive history of the Books of Samuel points to the narrative quality of these texts. The commentary explores the literary features of the Second Book of Samuel using methods of cultural studies narratology and combines these with a gender-sensitive perception of the narratives.
Summer West: Abstract Language Games. Narrating Neurodivergence and Conceptualizing Identity. De Gruyter Mouton, 2025.
Abstract nouns - power, privilege, race, gender, and identity - can embody varied positions that polarize the discourse around attempts to theorize them, particularly in contexts where disputes arise over activism and sociocultural change. This book therefore materializes out of one neurodivergent researcher's endeavor to examine the five selected nouns through topical narratives provided by six culturally and linguistically diverse participants who also identify as neurodivergent or divergent thinkers. Neurodivergent narratives from individuals of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds can inform how we understand intention in abstract English language.
Silvie Lang: Die Märchen aus dem Nachlass Franz Xaver Schönwerths. Quellenkritik, Gattungstypologie, Überlieferungs- und Motivgeschichte. Berlin: De Gruyter 2025.
Although various fairy tales from the estate of Franz Xaver Schönwerth (1810-1886) have already been made available to the public as reading editions, a fundamental source-critical and genre-typological examination of the material has not been available to date and is now accessible for the first time. In her dissertation, Silvie Lang examines the corpus from a literary studies perspective with regard to its history of transmission and motifs. Schönwerth's efforts to collect folk tales not only testify, according to Jacob Grimm, to an unparalleled commitment in the middle of the 19th century, but also provide insights into the oral tradition of the Upper Palatinate, where Schönwerth primarily collected and had collected. In addition to exemplary individual analyses of variants of known and unknown narrative types, the appendix provides diplomatic transcriptions of 158 fairy tales from the collection, which contains a total of around 500 fairy tales. This provides Schönwerth research and fairy tale research in general with a basis for further studies, as the work is not only a scholarly edition of the source material, but also an enrichment for the understanding of European folk tales.
David Römer / Martin Wengeler: Linguistische Diskursgeschichte. Einführung in die Analyse des öffentlich-politischen Sprachgebrauchs nach 1945. Berlin: De Gruyter 2025 (=Germanistische Arbeitshefte 53).
The workbook "Linguistische Diskursgeschichte" ("Linguistic Discourse History") is an established variety of discourse analysis for students of German studies and related subjects. First, the theoretical foundations of discourse linguistics, the concept of the 'public sphere' and the basics of narrative linguistic historiography are clarified and discussed. Subsequently, the methodological three-step analysis of the public-political vocabulary, metaphor fields and argumentation patterns or topoi is presented. In the empirical part of the book, the main features of the discourse-historical development of the topics of foreign security and the military, migration and economic crises are presented. The discourse on conspiracy theories, on the other hand, is more recent. The analysis of solidarity can be seen as an example of a conceptual history using linguistic means. A final focus is the historical presentation of language-related discourses, which are often subsumed under the label of political correctness. With this volume, students learn from concrete examples how our social "reality" is linguistically constituted.
- Recent linguistic history is closely interlinked with contemporary history
- Clarifies the linguistic construction of heterogeneous realities since 1945
- Democratic language culture becomes recognizable in practice, which contributes to increased language sensitivity
Information on authors / editors
Martin Wengeler, University of Trier; David Römer, University of Kassel.
Further information can be found here.