11 Aug 2025
Dance scholar Mariama Diagne, geologist Edgar Zorn, astrophysicist Julia Stadler, and literary scholar Tilo Renz have been awarded funding through the German Research Foundation’s Emmy Noether and Heisenberg programs.
The predictability of volcanoes, water creatures in art, structures of the universe, and knowledge in medieval texts – the German Research Foundation (DFG) has recognized four LMU scholars for their research through its Emmy Noether and Heisenberg programs.
© Carolin Seeliger
Mariama Diagne, Professor of Dance Research and Performance at LMU, has been awarded funding of over 700,000 euros by the German Research Foundation through the Emmy Noether program for her junior research group.
The focus of her project SubMarines between myth, the everyday and afterlife. Dance research perspectives on transfluidity is on performative, audiovisual, and ritual representations of sea people, or SubMarines as they are called here, as symbolic and artistic figures. This includes the likes of mermaids, mermen, the Mami Wata – a mythical water spirit from West African lore – and the Yemanjá, a sea goddess venerated in Brazilian narrative cultures. These figures move between myth and presence, between precolonial traditions and transmodern popular culture. Their embodiments occur in rituals, performances, and movies as well as in everyday practices and digital imagery.
The geographical scope of Mariama Diagne’s project ranges from the Atlantic to Brazil and from West Africa to Warsaw, whose coat of arms features a mermaid. The diversity of the water spirits is also reflected in the settings, including transatlantic coasts and coastal spaces worldwide – as well as the small lake in front of Nennhausen Castle in Brandenburg, where the Romantic figure Undine has its origins.
Mariama Diagne analyzes these figures as bodies in motion which call into question normative ideas of gender, identity, and the canon. These sea people, according to Diagne, intervene in the canon of stereotypical movements and body images and challenge the established culture and art scene. At the same time, her project looks at current trends such as mermaiding – the increasingly popular practice of swimming with a fishtail. Through her research, Diagne builds bridges between dance research, transmodern research, and postcolonial cultural theory – and reflects on esthetic and political body images in a global context.
© Edgar Zorn, CC 4.0
Dr. Edgar Zorn is a geoscientist at LMU’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. For his research into volcanoes, he has been awarded funding of approximately 1.5 million euros through the Emmy Noether Programme. Over the course of his six-year project, Volcano flank deformation and instability driven by the compaction of clastic deposits, he will investigate how volcanoes change after explosive eruptions – and how the resulting dangers can be better predicted in the future.
Volcanoes are built rapidly from the successive deposition of lavas and rock debris during eruptions. This heterogeneous material begins to compact after the eruption – that is, to compress under its own weight and through cooling. These processes exert stresses and deformations which can destabilize entire volcano flanks. Such instabilities range from small-scale rockfalls to catastrophic debris avalanches with widespread destruction. Past events of this kind have constituted some of the deadliest volcanic disasters in history and still remain poorly understood and unpredictable today.
Zorn is employing satellite data and field measurements to investigate post-eruptive deformations in volcanoes worldwide. In the laboratory, meanwhile, he is analyzing the physical and mechanical properties of volcanic deposits. With the aid of numerical models, he combines the results of both methods – in order to understand how instabilities arise and how to improve our assessment of the risks.
© Tilo Renz / Lorenz Becker
Literary scholar Dr. Tilo Renz researches German-language literature of the High and Late Middle Ages, with a particular focus on the knowledge that literary texts of the time were able to convey. From August 2025, his research at LMU’s Institute of German Philology is being funded through the German Research Foundation’s Heisenberg Programme, with an award of up to 600,000 euros over a period of five years.
Under the title, Collecting, organizing, presenting. Narrated knowledge in the Middle Ages, Renz has brought together three projects that address different forms and contents of medieval knowledge. The focus is on how literary texts present practices of collecting – for example, through the selection and combination of objects within narratives. His project adopts approaches from ‘thing studies,’ among other fields, which draw our attention to the significance of objects for narrated worlds and constellations of action.
Renz analyzes which organizational principles and meanings underlie the narrated object combinations – and how literary depictions can be connected to historical forms of collecting, such as church treasures or royal collections. This affords a fresh look at a knowledge practice of the Middle Ages, the cultural and esthetic dimensions of which have previously received scant critical attention.
Renz is also carrying out two further subprojects: In one of them, he is analyzing medieval depictions of paradise as literary blueprints of ideal societies. In the other, he is preparing a digital edition of a late medieval Alexander romance, which will open up new history-of-knowledge approaches to this text.
Astrophysicist Dr. Julia Stadler is founding a new research group at LMU’s University Observatory Munich. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has awarded her undertaking around 1.6 million euros in funding through its Emmy Noether Programme.
In her research, Julia Stadler analyzes the Cosmic Large Scale Structure reflected in the distribution of galaxies. Although these structures are measured very precisely by state-of-the-art telescopes and can contribute to a whole new understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, fully unlocking the scientific potential of the data has proved challenging.
The team led by Julia Stadler plans to establish a novel method of data analysis that allows conclusions to be drawn with very high precision and accuracy. Her approach is based on a computational model that reproduces the spatial development of large-scale cosmological structures from the time shortly after the Big Bang to their observation by humans. This model permits a three-dimensional comparison of the simulated structures against the spatially measured observational data.
As conceptual studies, including her own, have demonstrated the potential of such an approach, the team will elaborate the technology and apply it to state-of-the-art observational datasets. In doing so, the team will combine perturbative methods with the precise consideration of observation-related biases and verify the results against numerical simulations. With modern methods from the fields of statistics and machine learning, the researchers want to unlock the full scientific potential of the data and thus render new cosmological discoveries possible.