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
Stefanie Kreuzer and Caroline Frank (eds.): Classics of Austrian Literature. A Literary-Historical Journey Through Individual Text Analyses: Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2026.
The volume Classics of Austrian Literature presents a literary-historical spotlight on Austrian literature from the 19th to the 21st century. Through exemplary analyses of individual texts , the book takes readers on a journey through literary history . Important texts by significant authors are presented and analyzed from various perspectives. Epic, lyrical, and dramatic texts are collected in chronological order. These are by Raimund, Grillparzer, Stifter, Ebner-Eschenbach, Andrian, Beer-Hofmann, Rosegger, Kubin, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Meyrink, Trakl, Kraus, Kafka, Schnitzler, Horváth, Musil, Perutz, Canetti, Werfel, Zweig, Aichinger, Doderer, Haushofer, Bayer, Handke, Jandl, Wiener, Bachmann, Rosei, Jelinek, Bernhard, Ransmayr, Hackl, Streeruwitz, Geiger, Kehlmann, and Glavinic. There is also a side note on Vienna in film around 1930. The majority of the contributors are based at German universities and thus offer an “outside” perspective on the Austrian “classics” and their canonization.
The volume includes contributions by Caroline Frank, Stefan Greif, Urte Helduser, Stefan Höltgen, Stefanie Kreuzer, Urania Milevski, Birgit Nübel, Helmut Scheuer, Stefan Tetzlaff, and Andreas Wicke, among others.
Peter Hofmann / Natascha Raue (eds.) (2026): Quotation Unbound – Bridging the Divide Across Quotation Types. Special issue of the SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 23(2).
The special issue “Quotation Unbound – Bridging the Divide Across Quotation Types” is dedicated to various forms of quotation and speech reporting—from direct and indirect speech to mixed quotation, scare quotes, and free indirect speech. The focus is on the question of which common linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms underlie these forms and how their differences can be captured both theoretically and empirically.
Further information can be found here.
Gómez, Liliana / Brust, Alexander (eds.), Arts and Extractivism in the Global Present, Routledge, New York, 2026.
Through the lens of contemporary art, this book focuses on social ecologies and those spaces that are characterized, on the one hand, by a high degree of biodiversity and, on the other, by a long history of the extraction of resources, (neo)colonial relationships, and extractivism.
Contributors discuss the importance of ignored knowledge practices and systems as well as alternative designs of the world that reach beyond simply thinking about progress. Chapters posit that contemporary art and ethnographic objects reflect extractive practices and the potential for regeneration in very different ways. In dialog with one another, both art and the ethnographic object reveal alternative perspectives of agency, critical historiographies, and possible forms of living together in a new way. Foregrounding emerging environmental aesthetics, the book also critically engages the historical documents and artifacts collected by museums that bear witness today to knowledge gaps and the politics of resource transfer.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, ethnology, exhibition, and museum studies.
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.