Anneliese Maier Research Award

Prof. Dr. Douglas Cairns (Edinburgh), winner of the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, will use the award at a value of 250,000 euros for various research projects that will be carried out in cooperation with the Institute of Classical Philology at TU Dresden within the next five years (2018-2022).
Information on the award ceremony

The focus of our collaboration will be in the area of philological emotion research. The cooperation aims at establishing a close connection to the ERC Advanced Grant Project 741084 on Honour in Classical Greece (Edinburgh) and to the CRC 1285 Invectivity. Constellations and Dynamics of Disparagement (Dresden). The following main focuses result:

• Invective as a means of dishonour, as the obverse of respect
• The role of emotion in invective, in speaker, target, and audience

• The role of the body (especially in terms of language which evokes disgust and abjection) in strategies of dishonour and invective

• The role of metaphor, especially embodied metaphor, in all the above areas

During the cooperation period, Prof. Dr. Douglas Cairns will conduct research in Dresden usually for a period of two months per year to allow for intensive cooperation. In addition, together with Prof. Dr. Dennis Pausch, he will supervise the preparation of a dissertation on this topic. The dissertation is located at TU Dresden (including a one-year stay at the University of Edinburgh). For this purpose, a three-year doctoral fellowship will be awarded from 2019-2021.

In addition, for the years 2019, 2020, and 2022, three postdoctoral fellowships for a six-month research stay in Edinburgh will be offered, which will be associated with the ERC Grant project there.

Finally, joint research events are planned for each year from 2019 onwards, including presumably an international conference on the entire field of research in 2022.