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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Prof. Dr. Racha Kirakosian

 

Photo: Maurice Weiss I Ostkreuz

Curriculum

Racha Kirakosian joined Freiburg University as Professor of Medieval Studies at the German Seminar in 2020. She previously taught as Assistant, then as Associate Professor of German and Religion at Harvard University (2014–2020). At the University of Oxford, she was a Faculty Lecturer at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, a College Lecturer at Somerville College, and Director of Studies in German at Oriel College. She completed her doctorate in Medieval German at the University of Oxford in 2014. She studied history at the École nationale des chartes (Paris), as well as history and German philology at Göttingen University.

At Freiburg, she is a co-founder and co-director of the Digital Humanities Lab as well as co-director of the Center for Medieval Studies. She is a member of the executive board of the Meister Eckhart Society. From 2021 to 2026, she was a member of the Junge Akademie Berlin (German Young Academy). Her research focuses on the intellectual and religious history of the Middle Ages and on questions of materiality, embodiment, and cognition — including in interdisciplinary dialogue with neurosciences. Her team is currently running a project on inquiry-orientated dialogues funded by the Volkswagen Foundation: https://uni-freiburg.de/inqdialog/. For her research on neuromedievalism, she was awarded the Falling Walls Prize 2022; her book Berauscht der Sinne beraubt won the doxumentale prize in 2025 and was shortlisted for the Austrian Science Book Prize in the category ‚Medicine and Biology‘. She has held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study.

Publications (selection)

  • Berauscht der Sinne beraubt. Eine Geschichte der Ekstase, Berlin: Ullstein, Propyläen, 2025. 
  • From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety. The Vernacular Transmission of Gertrude of Helfta’s Visions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
  • Women Read. Differently? Text in Women Convents from the 13th to the 15th Centuries, TRAST, Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2026. Co-edited with Linus Möllenbrink and Meret Wüthrich. 
  • “The Placebo Effect and Long History of the Habit of Belief. How a Medieval Image Reveals the Power of the Invisible”,  Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 119 (2026). Co-authored with Philip Liston-Kraft, Ted Kaptchuk and Karin Jensen [first in: James Lind Library].
  • “Reading as a Mode of Attention. Medieval Prayer Practice and the Reader’s Speculation”, in: Close Reading as Attentional Practice, ed. by Marion Thain and Ewan Jones. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025, pp. 41–62.

Research project: Habitus and the Powers of the Soul, c. 1300

Building on Aristotelian as well as Augustinian principles, a sophisticated model of the soul was developed from the twelfth century onwards — one in which separate clusters of cognitive abilities were grouped respectively under the category of facultas (power). Thinkers such as Maimonides, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas described these powers of the soul and their mode of operation, and set them in relation to one another. The Dominican scholastic and preacher Meister Eckhart added a further power to this system of the soul’s powers, a noble power of the soul (edele kraft der sêle), which, according to Eckhart, surpasses all other powers. This power, he held, is the uncreated part of the human being and the place where the soul becomes one with God.

Essentially, the Middle High German term kraft corresponds to its Latin counterparts facultas and virtus (virtue). The concept of virtue, however, introduces a further important aspect of intellectual theory around 1300: the doctrine of habitus. According to this doctrine, virtues are positively evaluated habitūs, trained dispositions that should appear desirable to the rational human being. Tracing the history of ideas in texts from the twelfth to the fourteenth century promises to outline the concept of kraft in its historical-semantic depth, while drawing out its connection to the doctrine of habitus. A central connecting component between the two is the principle of potentia (capacity), since both habitūs (and therefore also virtutes) and facultates enable the human being to think and act in a particular way.