Prof. Dr. Eva Geulen
Photo: Uwe Dettmar
Curriculum
Since 2015, Eva Geulen has been director of the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research as well as Professor for European History of Culture and Knowledge at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She received her PhD in 1989 from Johns Hopkins University with a dissertation on Adalbert Stifter. From 2003 until 2012 she was Professor for German Literature at the University of Bonn and then at the Goethe University Frankfurt until 2015. She taught at various US institutions, including Stanford University, Rutgers University, New York University, Columbia University, and University of California, Berkeley.
Since 2025, she has been Secretary of the Humanities Class and Member of the Board as well as the Council of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She was co-editor of the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie from 2004 to 2025 and is one of the General Editors of the Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works. Her research focuses on literature and philosophy from the 18th century to the present.
Publications (selection)
- Aus dem Leben der Form. Studien zum Nachleben von Goethes Morphologie in der Theoriebildung des 20. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2021 (together with Eva Axer and Alexandra Heimes; with contributions by Michael Bies, Ross Shields and Georg Toepfer).
- Aus dem Leben der Form. Goethes Morphologie und die Nager. Berlin: August Verlag 2016.
- Giorgio Agamben zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius 2005.
- Das Ende der Kunst. Lesarten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2002.
Research project: Tests of Courage. On the Afterlife of a Praxis under Modern Conditions
With Kant’s translation of the Latin sapere aude as “dare (have courage) to make use of your own understanding”, courage did not only become a motto of the Enlightenment, but eventually turned into a condition of modern life, which requires courage to persist in an increasingly unreliable and predictable world. This development is accompanied by a reduction of courage’s once very rich semantics. Not much is left of the many different meanings and implications of the medieval ‘hohe muot’. Adelung’s Dictionary from the late 18th-century acknowledges that courage used to refer to the entirety of our capacities to desire, but adds that “soul and heart” (‘Gemüth und Herz’) have replaced the older ‘Mut’. That the German word for courage once meant all sorts of mood (‘Stimmungen’) in a general sense can only be gleaned from by now archaic composite nouns such as ‘Großmut’ (generosity), ‘Langmut’ (patience) or ‘Sanftmut’ (gentleness).
Any investigation of courage in philosophical-theoretical and literary texts since Kant must initially seem out of touch with our present predicaments. To be sure, manifestations of courage and the related religious term ‘Zuversicht’ (‘confidence in the future’) are hard to come by these days. At a time, when hope appears to presuppose the extinction of a form of life (Jonathan Lear, 2006), when optimism is called ‘cruel’ because it is regularly disappointed and proven wrong (Lauren Berlant, 2011), when ‘Afropessimism’ has become a general term, and when reasons for giving up on courage are omnipresent, the category appears entirely out of place. By the same token, however, versions of the stereotypical formula “Mut und Kraft” (‘courage and strength’) abound in life-style advice, identity politics as well as therapeutic literature in diverse media. Against this double background – and, as it were, despite and against both – the project examines how courage has been figured and argued for in selected texts since Kant. Particular attention will be given to the formulaic notion of ‘Mut und Kraft’.
That worn-down formula is what has remained of the long enduring nexus between courage and strength, which for Aristotle as well as many other authors, was still self-evident. In societies organized around the idea of honour, physical strength and courage in the sense of bravery, coincided in ‘manliness’. Its most famous instantiation has been to this day has the Homeric hero Achilles. He was, by all accounts, also a very angry man. And, indeed, anger (‘Zorn’) and courage were closely linked for a very long time. This helps to explain why courage, as part of Greek arete, but also in Christian contexts (‘encouraged by the strength of faith’) belonged to the catalogue of fixed virtues while also being considered as a fleeting affect, induced by particular situations. This field of tension between a virtuous habit and an unpredictable affect has remained virulent in modernity. Together with the question, where courage is to be situated in the relationships between individuals and collectives, this field of tension will serve as a guiding line for the research. Its overarching interest is the question whether it is possible to distinguish courage (‘Mut’) from seemingly related concepts such as the willingness to take risk or the current notion of ‘high agency’ and, instead, describe courage as a praxis in its own right.