2023—2024

Rüdiger Görner

Modern German Literature, Queen Mary University of London

Rüdiger Görner is Emeritus Professor for German and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He studied German, History, Philosophy and Music at University of Tübingen as well as English Literature and Philosophy at University College London. Since 1984 he taught at University of Surrey and Aston University in Birmingham, where he was Professor for German since 1997. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Director of the Institute of German Studies at University of London, since 2004 he was Professor for German Literature and Director of the Center for Anglo-German Cultural Relations at Queen Mary College, University of London. He was visiting professor in Tokyo, Mainz, Heidelberg and Vienna and was research fellow at the Internationale Kolleg Morphomata of Cologne University in 2012/13 and 2019. 2013/14 he held the first Georg Trakl Visiting Professorship at the University of Salzburg. 2022/23 he was Alexander von Humboldt Alumnus Fellow at University of Bonn. In 2012 he was awarded the Deutsche Sprachpreis of the Henning Kaufmann Foundation in Weimar; in 2015 the Reimar Lüst Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Rüdiger Görner is member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Bildung. In 2017 he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz).

The aim of Rüdiger Görner’s research is to examine the phenomenon of loss as a cultural-historical question of anthropological, psychological and aesthetic significance. This will involve various forms and manifestations of the experience of loss, including its protagonists, such as the mourner, the lost person, or the ‘prodigal son’.

During his HIAS Fellowship, Rüdiger Görner is working on his monograph SELECTIVE AFFINITIES. The Multiple Story of British-German Cultural Relations, which focuses on the web of intercultural relations between Germany and Britain that is central to the respective self-understandings of the two countries and their contexts. The work focuses on the areas of structural affinities derived from Hanseatic consciousness. Hanseatic Anglophilia and English pragmatics will be examined in their complementarity, which escaped even the ‘firestorm’ of 1943 (see Nossack, ‘Der Untergang’).

Rüdiger Görner’s tandem partner is Ute Berns, professor for British Studies at Universität Hamburg.

His HIAS fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.

Website

Rüdiger Görner

Funding

Universität Hamburg

Tandem

Ute Berns, Professor for British Studies, Universität Hamburg