New Emmy Noether and Heisenberg funding awarded

As part of the Emmy Noether and Heisenberg funding programmes, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has awarded new grants to 15 researchers per programme. Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) is represented among the award winners by Dr. Carmen Becker of the Institute for the Study of Religion and Prof. Dr. Julia Stenzel of the German Department.

Emmy Noether funding at the Institute for the Study of Religion

Dr. Carmen Becker has been a researcher at the LUH Institute for the Study of Religion since 2015. She has been awarded Emmy Noether funding for her project The Reproduction of Religion in Secular Societies (RelSec). In secular societies, fewer and fewer people are clearly professing their belonging to a religion and religious institutions are losing members. Nevertheless, religion is a central point of reference for differentiating between individuals, objects and collectives. For example, secular courts decide whether a community can be granted the status of a religious community. In educational contexts and the cultural sphere, religion is an element of cultural heritage. In four subprojects, the research group will study how religion is continually reproduced within social and institutional arenas as a category for differentiation and classification in secular societies.

The Emmy Noether Programme is intended for postdocs with outstanding qualifications and junior professors with non-permanent contracts who are in the early stages of their academic career. It enables them to obtain the qualifications necessary for a university professorship by independently heading an Emmy Noether research group over the course of six years.

Heisenberg Professorship in the German Department

Prof. Dr. Julia Stenzel has been the Heisenberg professor for German literature from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in the German Department of the Faculty of Humanities since 1 October 2024. Her Heisenberg project is titled Equivalent Certainties. Scenologies of Assurance and Uncertainty in Theatre, Performance and Society (20th/21st centuries). It views itself as a bridge between theatre studies, philology, and the history of education and knowledge. A central point of departure in the project’s work is the historically and philologically informed critique of modern readings of foundational democratic concepts such as polis, demos and agora against the backdrop of the antique texts they are based on. The project re-examines fundamental models of identification and difference in “theatre” and contributes to a theatre-studies approach to religion research.

The Heisenberg Programme is open to researchers who fulfil the conditions for appointment to a tenured professorship. It enables them to continue their own high-calibre projects at the location of their choice and to continue to advance their academic reputation over a period of up to five years in preparation for a leadership position in research.