Research projects in Research Area D

Canon formation in traditional China

Department: Sinology
Job Vacancy: 1x PhD-Position (65% E13)
Project Description: While much has been written about the compilation of the venerable scriptures of ancient China into a canon that varied and grew over the centuries, we know much less about the canonization, the writing of commentaries, and the anthologization of historical and belles-lettres literature in ancient China. This project aims to examine the processes of canon formation in traditional China in general and through individual examples. Such examples may be the canonical scriptures of Confucianism; the early dynastic histories that became the canon of the “Three or Four Standard Histories”; “The Selection of Literature” (Wenxuan), which served as a model for elegant writing for centuries to come; or the canonical writings in languages other than Chinese that were in use in China for long periods of time.
Responsible PI: Prof. Dr. Hans van Ess
Research Area: D (Texts and Commentaries, Canon Formation, and Censorship)

Department: New Testament and Second Temple Judaism
Job Vacancy: 1x PhD-Position (65% E13)
Project Description: A study of the rich commentary tradition of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) in the Horn of Africa has until now not been undertaken. The reception of 1 Enoch, which occupies a unique position among the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible scriptures in Ethiopian Christianity and Judaism (Beta Israel), shall be undertaken on the basis of several sources for evidence: (1) the Andǝmta (available in print, alongside several manuscripts); (2) paratexts and marginal notes that exhibit commentary to the text in selected manuscripts of the earlier recension of the book; and (3) discrete traditions preserved by traditional scholars of the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church (Ethiopia) and Beta Israel (Israel).
Responsible PI: Prof. Dr. Loren Stuckenbruck
Research Area: D (Texts and Commentaries, Canon Formation, and Censorship)

Department: Computational Humanities; Computational Literary Studies; German Studies
Job Vacancy: 1x Postdoc (100% E13)
Project Description: While canonization has mostly been investigated as a stable result or outcome and with regard to a small number of canonized works, the project looks at canon formation as a dynamic process with a special interest in the ‘patterns of canon formation’. The following objects shall be achieved: (a) Detecting relevant patterns of canon formation as part of social practices, (b) unfolding a framework of the temporality of such patterns, and (c) correlating the processes of canon formation as social practice with processes of retextualization.
Applicants are expected to have a strong methodological expertise in the fields of computational humanities and computational literary studies as well as an interest in at least two cultural domains, including German literary history. Applicants are expected to collaborate with neighboring digital projects and to contribute their expertise to the Cluster’s digital humanities activities (including workshops in digital methods such as stylometry, topic modeling, machine learning, etc.).
Responsible PI: Prof. Dr. Julian Schröter
Research Area: D (Texts and Commentaries, Canon Formation, and Censorship)

Department: Slavic Philology
Job Vacancy: 1x PhD-Position (65% E13)
Project Description: Storytelling contributes to the establishment and coherence of social communities, their integration into or differentiation within larger cultural spheres. Focusing on the Slavic linguistic and cultural area and its larger embedding, this project aims to model the dissemination of topics and concepts, their adaptation and stabilisation within and across languages, and to understand the sociocultural circumstances that helped to promote – or inhibit – the transmission of ideas.
The project offers a PhD position in Slavic philology to explore the diachronic and distributional dynamics of cultural transmission on the example of selected case studies, in particular 1) the construction of history on the example of the Kievan Rus’ in Old East Slavic Chronicles and folk epic, or 2) the translation, adaption and transmission of cultural concepts in the Alexander Romance.
Responsible PI: Prof. Dr. Barbara Sonnenhauser
Research Area: D (Texts and Commentaries, Canon Formation, and Censorship)