Call for Applications: Fellowships in the Käte Hamburger Research Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE)
Starting 1 April 2024, the newly founded Käte Hamburger Research Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation will begin its work at Saarland University. We are inviting applications for both junior (postdoc) and senior fellowships for a period of up to 12 months, to be held during the centre’s first academic year (October 2024 to September 2025).
The great task facing Europe in its future is to reshape its relationship with the world—and this insight has now advanced to become a central concern in both cultural production and reflection. In the face of harms which pose existential threats and cannot be repaired, practices of cultural reparation take on a function of founding the future.
The goal of the centre is to develop a transmedial theory of practices and processes of cultural reparation from a historical and transcultural perspective, thus helping to formulate a sociopolitical understanding of cultural reparations as a field of action. Its work is intended as a contribution toward reorienting cultural studies and creating knowledge about individual and collective processes of reparation in a globalized world—as insight that is indispensable for living together in the future.
Our focus will be on memory cultures and historical-political discourses; individual experiences of harm, humiliation, and loss; and cultural-ecological questions.
Scholars in cultural studies and the humanities in the postdoc phase or further along in their academic careers are invited to apply. Fellows should be pursuing an independent research project that is relevant to the centre’s research agenda and should be the main focus of their work during their stay. The project should align with at least one of the centres’ three thematic fields—’history’, ‘experience’, and ‘nature’—and relate to the first of the four designated themes for the following
academic years:
• 2024/2025: Theory
• 2025/2026: Society
• 2026/2027: Bodies
• 2027/2028: Things