Project at HIAS

Style: An Interdisciplinary Story

The multifaceted concept of style originates from the Latin stilus, a writing tool with two ends. Originally used to describe how a work is shaped by its environment, the term has since been extended to the sciences, mathematics, and other fields. This project investigates style as a point of connection between historical, cultural, and scientific forms of knowledge. By tracing the disciplinary histories that shape these domains, it lays the groundwork for a comparative study of works of art and the epistemologies they embody.

Biography

Since 2020, Johannes Endres has been Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Art History at the University of California, Riverside, where he has taught since 2015. His current book project, Style: A Unified Theory, investigates style as a transdisciplinary concept. This research has been supported by a 2023 fellowship at Durham University’s Institute for Advanced Study and earlier research residencies at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and the Getty Research Institute. His recent publications include studies of Early Romantic cosmopolitanism and cynicism, collecting and museum cultures, Hans Blumenberg’s art-historical thought, Leonardo da Vinci, and Heinrich von Kleist, as well as the co-authored exhibition catalogue Ich liebe Deine Liebe and the co-edited volume Collecting in the Twenty-First Century: From Museums to the Web, both published in 2022. His broader publication record includes two monographs and major edited volumes on Friedrich Schlegel, fetishism, visual culture, and the veil as medium and metaphor.

Endres’ interdisciplinary teaching and research bring European literary and cultural studies into dialogue with art history, aesthetics, media theory, and the history of knowledge. A central concern of his work is the theory and history of images in a broad sense, including relations between image and text, visual representation and materiality, iconology, ekphrasis, portraiture, collecting, and the epistemic functions of works of art. His research ranges across German Romanticism, Goethe, Hans Blumenberg, Leonardo da Vinci, and the history of fetishism, as well as such visual and material motifs as the veil, the face, the bust, the time capsule, and the museum.

Johannes Endres‘ HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.