Current Fellows

Fellow, October 2026–March 2027
hanna.engelmeier[at]kwi-nrw.de

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen and an author of literary nonfiction, interested in contemporary German literature (especially hybrid forms), the aesthetics of obsolescence, and the history of anthropology. My latest book is Trost. Vier Übungen (Matthes & Seitz, 2021), winner of the Clemens Brentano Prize.

Slow Looking: Practices of Narrating and Describing in Literature

Narrating and describing are two methods ubiquitous in the humanities, which I seek to interpret and expand for the case of literature as an applied humanities discipline. My investigation of literary technique focuses on image descriptions and retellings embedded in essays and other literary texts. Whereas image description is a central tool of knowledge production in art history, systematically taught in practical encounters with original artworks, literary and cultural studies have no comparably systematic practice for representing texts in texts. I ask why that is—and make such “exercises” performative by undertaking them myself.

Photo: Jakob Schnetz

Fellow, October 2026–March 2027
mathias.grote[at]uni-greifswald.de

I am a hybrid scholar working between the sciences and humanities: after a Masters in philosophy and biology and a PhD in microbiology, I turned to the history of science. Since 2023, I have been Heisenberg Professor of the History of Knowledge at the University of Greifswald.

Information Infrastructures before the Web: Politics and Technologies, ca. 1960–1990

Whereas the notion of “information” today seems inextricable from computers and the Web, my project examines information practices and sciences of the 1960s–1980s that conceived of information as a global problem of modern societies, straddling natural and social science and the humanities. Interest in information was driven by Big Science and new media technologies, but also by political strategies concerning the role of knowledge in society. Max Stadler and I investigate public and private information infrastructures in West Germany, East Germany, and international organizations such as UNESCO. By unearthing a past future of information, we aim to enrich current debates on publishing and open access.

Photo: Patrick Gessner, Universität Greifswald

Fellow, October 2026–March 2027
florian.meinel[at]jura.uni-goettingen.de

I teach comparative constitutional law and political science at the University of Göttingen, faculty of law. Before joining the University of Göttingen, I was a professor of public law and jurisprudence at Würzburg. I hold a PhD in public law from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Is Property Law Applied Property Theory?

During my stay at the Center, I will work on a book about the political stakes involved in property law. The study is a historical and comparative dialogue between private and public property law, with the help of some trustworthy and loyal pieces of social science. How might we think of property if we set aside all the small and large assets with which we constantly associate it? Property, I argue, is an abstraction that enables the four mega-institutions of modern law—persons, wealth, money, and administration—to inhabit the same legal world through connectors. The interesting question is never what property “is,” but the ways in which these connectors are built and how the shape basic assumptions about power, personality, and social conflict.

Photo: private

Fellow, October 2026–February 2027
carlos.spoerhase[at]lmu.de

Carlos Spoerhase is a literary theorist and professor of German literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. A former fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, he has held visiting professorships at Penn, Princeton, and EHESS. In spring 2027, he will be Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair at NYU.

Marx in Miniature: Abridgment as Popularization and Political Intervention

From the outset, Marx’s works were marked by their genuinely collaborative character, evident in not only his partnership with Engels, but also his engagement with mediating agents. Marxism developed in close cooperation with its translators: Marx and Engels stayed in contact with those rendering their works into other languages, sometimes authorizing and supervising translations. They were equally involved in abridgment. In ongoing exchanges with abridgers, they reviewed and commented on the “miniaturized” texts. Beyond making Marx’s arguments accessible to a wider audience, these abridgments helped to isolate his core ideas, promising to render them applicable to political struggles.

Photo: LMU/Florian Generotzky