Call: 1 Junior Fellowship Summer Term 2025

6 June 2024

We are awarding 1 Junior Fellowship in the summer term 2025 for the duration of 6 months:

Application requirement:

The call is addressed to advanced PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in the field of literary studies. A prerequisite for an application is a research project related to notions and discourses of force/power.

Subject area of the call:

Hardly any field of cultural reflection can do without conceptualizations of force. Conceptions of religious or magical (creative force, magic powers), human (vis animae, impulse, willpower), political (kratos, potestas, power, rule, charisma), physical (gravity, attraction, energy), biological (procreative force, vital force, formative force), physiological (muscular force, perceptive force) or socioeconomic (labor force, buying power) forces refer to the dominance as well as to the plasticity of the concept of force and its derivatives. Since antique poetics and rhetoric, transmitted via the art and poetry doctrines of the Early Modern period, the arts in particular have strikingly often developed their performance profile with reference to the doctrines of force (creative force, imaginative force, movere). It is therefore all the more astonishing that the transitions and transfers between uses of the concept of force in the natural sciences, cultural studies, and the arts have hardly been investigated systematically. The aim of the CAS »Imaginarien der Kraft« is, to bring together a variety of disciplinary approaches to concepts of force and force-related concepts, in order to explore their emergence and transformations in the arts. Starting point is the observation that the term 'force' (Greek dynamis, Latin potentia) denotes the ability to exert effects, but that forces themselves are not perceivable. They can only be detected indirectly by their effects. The arts and reflections on them, so a guiding thesis, constitute a privileged site of engagement with the sensory presence effects of non-sensory forces.

While the first funding phase (2019-2023) focused on the transitions between natural philosophy, natural science, and aesthetics, the second funding phase of the CAS (2023-2027) will set three new focal points. In the study of aesthetic forces, the focus is on 1) their affinity to the unquantifiable forces of the numinous, 2) the relationship between European and non-European concepts of force, and 3) the creative, artistic, and literary explorations of historical and contempory practices of energy production and the energy landscapes that result from them.

The summer term 2025 is especially dedicated to the annual theme "Resistance". We explore resistance as a force that is not only important for a natural philosophy and metaphysics of antagonisms (actio - reactio), but also for the description of political dynamics between rule respectively action and resistance or reaction, as well as, above all, for a conceptualization of artistic 'resistances' (such as those of materials or production environments).

We offer:

• Junior Fellowship for the duration of 6 months (01.04.–30.09.2025)
• The amount of the stipend corresponds to the rates of the German Research Foundation (DFG) respectively AvH.
• travel expenses for a single round trip to and from Hamburg
• a fully equipped workplace in the representative premises of the CAS »Imaginarien der Kraft« located close to the city centre
• library service
  

We expect:

• regular, active participation in weekly discussions and project presentations of the CAS as well
  as a presentation of one's own research project

Further information on the CAS »Imaginarien der Kraft« can be obtained from the website: www.imaginarien-der-kraft.uni-hamburg.de/en.html

Application documents:

• Cover letter
• CV
• List of publications
• Outline of a research proposal with distinct reference to the topics of the CAS, preferably to the annual theme "Resistance" (max. 5 pages, excl. bibliography)
• Sample text
• Reference contacts

For queries and more detailed information, please contact Dr. Caroline Herfert: caroline.herfert"AT"uni-hamburg.de.

Please send your application by e-mail (in a single PDF file) by June 15, 2024 to: imaginarien.der.kraft"AT"uni-hamburg.de

Contact:

DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe »Imaginarien der Kraft«
Gorch-Fock-Wall 3, first floor (on the left)
20354 Hamburg
Deutschland
imaginarien.der.kraft@uni-hamburg.de (imaginarien.der.kraft"AT"uni-hamburg.de)
www.imaginarien-der-kraft.uni-hamburg.de/en.html

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