Project at HIAS
The Sublime, the Uncanny, the Epic, the Tragic, the Comedic, the Elegiac, the Apocalyptic: Modes of an Aesthesis of the Anthropocene
Eva Horn’s project as HIAS revolves around a set of aesthetic modes that could be elements of an aesthetic of the Anthropocene, such as the Epic, the Sublime, the Uncanny, the Tragic, the Comedic, the Elegiac, and the Apocalyptic. As forms of aesthetic experience and representation they are not bound to a specific medium or genre. These modes can constitute an “aesthesis” that would allow for an access to the profoundly altered world of the Anthropocene.
Together with her Tandem Partner, the philosopher Juliane Rebentisch, Eva Horn thinks about how these different aesthetic modes can reflect a new “being-in-the-world” in the Anthropocene.
Website
Funding
The 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.
Tandem
Prof. Dr. Juliane Rebentisch, Philosophy, HFBK Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Hamburg
Prof. Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch, German Studies, University of Hamburg
Biography
Eva Horn is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Department of German at the University of Vienna, Austria. She studied Comparative, German and French Literature, and Philosophy at the Universities of Bielefeld, Konstanz and at the Sorbonne I, Paris. She held Post-Doc positions at Konstanz and the Europa-Universität, Frankfurt/Oder, and was a professor at the the University of Basel. Together with the geologist Michael Wagreich, she is the founder and director of the Vienna Anthropocene Network. Since 2024, she is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group. She is a member at the Academia Europaea. As a visiting professor, she has taught at NYU, Columbia, the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and NTNU Taiwan. She has been a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center and the Wissenschaftschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2020 she received the Heinrich Mann-Prize by the German Academy of the Arts.
Eva Horn’s area of research today is the understanding and representations of nature in the face of the current ecological crisis through the lens of literature, art, and the history of knowledge. In the past years, she has worked on disaster imagination in the Modern age (The Future as Catastrophe, Columbia University Press, 2018) and has published, together with Hannes Bergthaller, an introduction into the concept of the Anthropocene for the humanities (The Anthropocene – Key Issues for the Humanities. Routledge, 2020). Recently, she has published a book on the cultural history and the aesthetic perceptions of climate (Klima. Eine Wahrnehmungsgeschichte, Fischer, 2024).
Horn’s 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.
