Birgit Ulrike Münch | The Humanities Between Historical Complexity and Present-Day Tasks

This lecture will describe the current discussions around, and results of, the German Excellence Strategy—federal funding intended to strengthen internationally competitive, cutting-edge research—and embed them in the debates about the status, challenges, and future of the humanities at large. In doing so, Münch will focus on a specific research project with the intention of demonstrating its timeliness. This project concerns the representation of “vertically challenged” people in early modern paintings. The phenomenon is both historically and systematically fascinating because, in many early modern courts, people of short stature were a group that had access to a wide range of desirable positions and thus constituted a paradoxical interconnection between social privilege and physical challenge.

Starting from this complicated and enigmatic situation of the past, Münch will argue for a new perspective in dependency, identity, and minority studies. Instead of insisting on the usual, one-sided interpretation of physical difference as a “disadvantage,” specific cultural configurations from the past and the attention that great artists gave to them provoke a more complex and dialectical view of similar phenomena in our present-day discussions. Such considerations stemming from her work as an art historian will lead to some concluding remarks about tasks and functions of the humanities and universities at large in present-day Europe, arguing for the further development of the tradition of activating the public sphere with impulses of counter-intuitive, view-changing, and ultimately liberating thought.


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