At First

February 6

It’s time again for the new Fellow class’s Köpfe und Ideen. Like last year, we will send you the individual articles in advance electronically in the coming months. The printed magazine will appear as usual in early summer – for what will now be the tenth edition.

The overture will be a text on the focus group “Tibetan Genealogies”, which concerns this multifaceted topic as well as the intellectual diversity of its members: a religious studies scholar from Lhasa, a Tibetologist from Peking, and a social anthropologist from Vienna. The essay’s author is Michael Oppitz, a former Fellow and expert on Tibetan high mountain and Central Asian intellectual landscapes.

You will find Sounding Tibet in Grunewald in two languages, supplemented by an outlook on the coming texts and links to the Fellows and events at the Kolleg.

Cordial greetings from the flatlands of the March Brandenburg!

March 18

If it "clangors" at the Wissenschaftskolleg then it must be a Lewitscharoff-ism. No surprise! Since Sibylle Lewitscharoff is this year's writer in residence and has her very own way of perceiving the activities and goings-on around her. Please read her tauntingly affectionate portrait of life at the Kolleg...

Cordial greetings!

April 15

The Zurich evolutionary biologist Paul Schmid-Hempel was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg during the 2006/2007 academic year and was appointed a Permanent Fellow in the succeeding year. Among other advisory capacities, he primarily lends his expertise to the Rector and the Academic Advisory Board in questions of biology and the life sciences. The conversation with science writer Stefan Klein affords insight into Paul Schmid-Hempel’s research. They discuss the sometimes seemingly creepy parallel world of parasites and their impact on us – an impact that doesn’t stop short of affecting our own behavior!

Warm greetings!

May 6

Michel Chion is a scholar of sound, a film historian, and a composer. He writes on such figures as Stanley Kubrick and Jacques Tati, creates musique concrète, a school free of classical notation, and all that he does ultimately refers back to the relation of sound, voice and image – or more broadly: noises and their surroundings.
Literary critic Ina Hartwig met with him and listened closely to this highly original thinker.

Warm greetings!

June 2

The June mail brings you Sianne Ngai, professor of literary studies at Stanford University. Her work is concerned with contemporary aesthetic categories, she deals with concepts such as “cute” and “zany,” and during her fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg she has focused on the phenomenon of the gimmick. Hans-Joachim Neubauer talks to her about her scholarship in a highly pertinent locale – namely the Mall of Berlin .

July 15

With this last portrait of Fellow David Halperin, we say farewell to the year 2014/2015. His books on conceptual history and the history of homosexuality show that he began his academic career as a scholar of Greek. Today he is one of the most prominent scholars in Gender Studies and his agenda is to free the concept of Eros from the modern era’s focus on sexuality. Berlin journalist Jutta Person followed his sophisticated distinctions.