Dialogical Cultures – Critical Reflection Spaces for Cultural Studies and Social Sciences
The KU Center for Advanced Studies “Dialogical Cultures – Critical Reflection Spaces for Cultural Studies and Social Sciences” (KU CAS) is an internationally oriented center for the promotion of interdisciplinary research in cultural studies and the social sciences at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. Supporting doctoral and postdoctoral studies as well as research projects conducted by experienced and well-established scholars, the KU CAS aims at facilitating and enhancing scholarly exchange and critical debate beyond disciplinary boundaries.
The KU Research Center “Dialogical Cultures – Critical Reflection Spaces for Cultural Studies and Social Sciences” invites applications from experienced scholars in the humanities, cultural and social sciences for its Senior Fellowship 2025. The fellowship offers a 3–4-week research stay at KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and access to an interdisciplinary research network.
Applications (PDF, max. 20 MB) by April 30, 2025 to: forschungskolleg-dialogkulturen@ku.de
This workshop aims to provide a space for interdisciplinary exchange on practices, memory constructions, and affiliations in selected border regions of South America since independence. The focus will be on contact zones that have been and continue to be reconstituted as a result of colonization, settlement, economic exploitation, progressive missionary activity, state-controlled expansion processes, as well as resulting local resistance.
The concept of "doing frontiers" through action, speech, memory, thought, and feeling is central to this workshop. It is based on an open concept of the frontier that seeks to capture the emergence, transformation, and disappearance of social formations, their order forms, customs, representations, attributions of meaning, and memories under conditions of cultural contact.
The workshop will bring together selected researchers from the fields of history, literature, art and media studies, linguistics, communication studies, geography, and anthropology from Europe and Latin America. Through concrete case studies, we will explore the practices of (self-)affirmation and negotiation that different actors use to locate themselves or are located in certain border spaces. The goal is to integrate Latin America more strongly into the current research discourses of Border and Frontier Studies and, at the same time, contribute to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of South American border regions.
You are invited to join the important discussions at this interdisciplinary dialogue.
Fellows at the KU CAS Dialogical Cultures in the winter term 2023/24
We are looking forward to welcoming the following fellows at the KU CAS Dialogical Cultures this winter term:
Dr. Davide Bagnardi(Classical Philology, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), Henriette Herz Junior Fellow, ““Intellectual Mystics at Helfta in dialogue with the divinity: Mechtilde of Hackeborn’s Liber Specialis Gratiae””
Dr. Aura Piccioni (Classical Archeology, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”), Henriette Herz Junior Fellow, “Dialogues of Peoples, Dialogues of Art: Bronze Statues as Identity Carriers in Sicily”
Learn more about our current and past fellows here.
Dialogues of Peoples, Dialogues of Art: Bronze Statues as Identity Carriers in Sicily
Guest Lecture by Dr. Aura Piccioni, Henriette Herz Junior Fellow at the KU Center for Advanced Studies "Dialogical Cultures".
The lecture will be held in German in person. Everyone is welcome, it is not necessary to register in advance.
The main topic of this project is the study of the bronze sculptures as identity carriers, paying special attention to their origin and creation, their context, their perception and their significance in a 'hybrid' and composite society as that of Sicily from the 8th c. BC until the Roman conquer. Continuities and upheavals can be well tracked over a longer period of time, since various cultures lived in close contact and exchange in Sicily, beginning with the indigenous peoples
The mixing of the various ethnic groups led to a sort of “creolization” in art. The focus on bronze statues is due to the fact that the Greek and Roman cultures were highly “visual” and statues were ubiquitous; large figurative bronzes are probably the most sophisticated art products of the various inhabitants of ancient Sicily and come in culturally homogeneous contexts as well as in ‘hybrid’ ones.
Communication via bronze sculptures plays an important role. Through these, the clients expressed their values and showed their prestige in society. Particularly, elites shaped their own concepts with regard to integration practices, dealing with conflict and the exercise of prestige, combined with “cultural codes”, and also expressed them in the choice, preference and positioning of works of art. Therefore, bronze sculptures, or rather their ‘executors’ and ‘consumers’, were subject to social norms and values. Depending on the context, there would have been different recipients. So, clients, artists and viewers entered into a dialogue through the bronze sculptures.
The aim of this study is a detailed introduction to a major project, in order to systematize the sources and provide some preliminary remarks.
