Anneliese Maier Research Award

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

The focus of this collaboration was in the area of philological emotion research. The cooperation aimed 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 common research areas were the following:

• 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 regularly stayed in Dresden for a longer period. Together with Prof. Dr. Dennis Pausch, he supervised a dissertation on this topic. The dissertation was located at TU Dresden (including a one-year stay at the University of Edinburgh). For this purpose, a three-year doctoral fellowship was awarded from 2019-2021.

In addition, for the years 2019, 2020, and 2022, three postdoctoral fellowships for a six-month research stay in Edinburgh were offered.

Finally, joint research events took place from 2019 onwards:

• 2019 Workshop "Hubris, Ancient and Modern"
• 2022 Workshop "Contempt, Ancient and Modern"
• 2023 Conference "Mixed Feelings. THe Phenomenology of Mixed Affect in Philosophy, Literature, and Historiography"