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.
Devotio et charitas excitari: Inner and Outer dialogues in Mechthild of Hackeborn
Guest Lecture by Dr. Davide Bagnardi, Henriette Herz Junior Fellow at the KU Center for Advanced Studies "Dialogical Cultures".
The lecture will be held in person, without Zoom transmission. Everyone is welcome, it is not necessary to register in advance.
From 1251, under the guidance of its second abbess, Gertrude of Hackeborn (1232 – 1291 or 1292), the Cistercian monastery of Helfta, east of Eisleben, experienced the period of its maximal cultural flourishing and became the radiating center of Saxon female mysticism in the 13th century, above all due to the co-presence of three intellectual gems of vivid splendor: Mechtilde of Hackeborn, Gertrude of Helfta, and Mechtilde of Magdeburg. Mechtilde of Hackeborn received an excellent education and, in constant dialogue with the divinity, narrated her mystical experiences to an anonymous sister and to Gertrude of Helfta. The nuns, therefore, decided to write down what Mechtilde narrated: the Liber Specialis Gratiae was born. The first five of the seven books that make up the work hinge on Mechtilde’s revelations, the descriptions of the transcendent experiences, which are extremely vivid and endowed with a refined pictorial elegance. Every significant moment is placidly punctuated by the intimate dialogue that the mystic maintains with the Son of God.
The Liber Specialis Gratiae immediately enjoyed considerable success, particularly in northern Europe. Although in all likelihood the first draft of the work actually took place in Latin, some claim that it was written in German. Whatever the actual situation, there is no organic philological study on the Latin text that methodically compares the works of the two mystics who grew up and educated in Helfta, fruits of a common feeling and daily reciprocity, and which reconstructs the intellectual and spiritual mosaic kept inside the monastery. The same problem concerns other aspects of the Liber.
Aim of this project is the accurate reconstruction of the framework of interdependencies in the Latin mystical-literary production of the convent, outlining the lines of development of the cloister’s production and the dialogue with the divinity and the other mystics of the time, with an eye to contemporary women writers.
