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Erhard Schüttpelz is laureate of the Wissenschaftspreis 2025

Aby-Warburg-Stiftung awards its scholar's prize to Erhard Schüttpelz, Professor of Media Theory at the University of Siegen

Erhard Schüttpelz, born in 1961 in Haldern (now Rees), studied in Hannover, Exeter, Bonn, Cologne and Oxford (St. Johns) and completed his doctorate in 1994 at the University of Bonn. In 1994/95 he was a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Columbia University, New York. From 1996 to 1998, he was a postdoc at the DFG Research Training Group Theory of Literature and Communication at the University of Konstanz; from 1998 to 2003, he was a research associate preparing and then working at the DFG Collaborative Research Centre Media and Cultural Communication at the universities of Cologne, Bonn and Aachen. He completed his habilitation at the University of Konstanz in 2003, where he was scientific coordinator of the research initiative Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary from 2003 to 2005, funded by the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize awarded to Albrecht Koschorke. In 2005, he was a fellow at the IFK (Vienna). Since 2005, he has been a professor of media theory at the University of Siegen. Principal investigator of the DFG Research Training Group Locating Media and the DFG Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation. 2012-2016 Elected member of the DFG Review Board 103, 2018-2022 Member of the University Council of the University of Siegen. He has also held fellowships in Weimar, Konstanz, Berlin (FU), Münster and at the Center for Advanced Studies – Erlangen.

His interests are in the fields of philology and cultural studies. They first led him from structuralist literary theory to the linguistic theory of rhetorical figures, fuelled by a fondness for impossible syntheses that could have bridged the gap between continental and analytical philosophy, for cross-disciplinary border crossers, for the history of science in the humanities in the context of science and technology studies, and for figures of transition, border objects, tricksters, disturbances, images. He found his home in the German media studies that had emerged in the meantime – of which he says they are »a discipline that I could neither have studied nor better have thought up in order to pursue my interest in opportunities for cooperation.«

His films and books include, among others, a film with the working title Gaabi Cirey! and the voice of Hanns Zischler (with Anja Dreschke and Carlo Peters), the film A Kind of World War (with Anselm Franke, 2021), online at: https://www.hkw.de/de/app/mediathek/video/84649 and the books A Kind of World War / Eine Art Weltkrieg (with Anselm Franke, Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2021), Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven. Weltliteratur und Ethnologie 1870-1960 (Munich 2005), Deutland (Berlin 2023) and Medium, Medium: Elemente einer Anthropologie (Berlin 2025). His volume »Schlangenritual«. Der Transfer der Wissensformen vom Tsu’ti’kive der Hopi bis zu Aby Warburgs Kreuzlinger Vortrag (Berlin 2007), co-edited with Cora Bender and Thomas Hensel, emerged from a conference at the Warburg-Haus in 2002.

Date and title of Erhard Schüttpelz’s laureate lecture at the Warburg-Haus in the second half of 2025 are to be announced in the near future.

• Publications by Erhard Schüttpelz on Researchgate
• Aby Warburg Foundation Wissenschaftspreis

Wissenschaftspreis