Journal

Valentin Groebner is laureate of the Wissenschaftspreis 2024

Aby-Warburg-Stiftung awards its scholar's prize to Valentin Groebner, Professor of history with main focus on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance at the University of Lucerne

Valentin Groebner, born in Vienna in 1962, teaches Medieval and Renaissance History at the University of Lucerne since March 2004, after stays as a wandering scholar in Berlin, Cambridge/Massachusetts, Paris and Zurich.

The texts and images from the past he is interested in are embarrasingly contaminated with the mundane everyday present. He has worked on corruption and political language in the 15th and 16th centuries (Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts, Philadelphia 2002), on images of extreme violence (Defaced, New York 2004) and on the history of passports and identification (Who Are You?, New York 2007). More recent books deal with modern stagings of history (Das Mittelalter hört nicht auf, Munich 2008), the artifical worlds of tourism (Retroland, Frankfurt/M. 2018), the paradoxes of self-fashioning (Bin ich das? Eine kurze Geschichte der Selbstauskunft (Frankfurt/M. 2021) and the commodity forms of the aesthetic (Aufheben, Wegwerfen. Vom Umgang mit schönen Dingen, Konstanz 2023). Currently, he is pondering about nostalgia. How do we interact with the lost worlds of yesterday we so melancholically (and lustfully) long for?

Date and title of Valentin Groebner’s laureate lecture at the Warburg-Haus in 2024 are to be announced in the near future.

• Valentin Groebner on the web page of the University of Lucerne
• Aby Warburg Foundation Wissenschaftspreis

Wissenschaftspreis