“Great intellectual curiosity”

Historian Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger awarded Bielefeld Science Prize

The early modern historian Prof. Dr. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Deputy Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics”, will be awarded this year’s Bielefeld Science Prize, as was announced by Bielefeld University. “With Prof. Stollberg-Rilinger, we honour a scholar who is not only one of the most outstanding representatives of her discipline, but who has also kept crossing disciplinary boundaries with great intellectual curiosity,” explains the rector of Bielefeld University and chairman of the jury, Professor Dr.-Ing. Gerhard Sagerer. “In her research, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger has always looked beyond the boundaries of her field, drawing her inspiration from sociology and not least also from Niklas Luhmann.”
Since 2004, the Bielefeld Science Prize has been awarded in memory of sociologist Niklas Luhmann by the foundation “Stiftung der Sparkasse Bielefeld” in association with Bielefeld University and the city of Bielefeld.

Cultural history of the political

According to the jury of the Bielefeld Science Prize, Prof. Stollberg-Rilinger has opened up a new perspective on the practices of power and the exercise of power not only to the science of history with her programme of a cultural history of the political. Her books, which are read far beyond the boundaries of the discipline, include “Des Kaisers alte Kleider. Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches” (The Emperors Old Clothes. Constitutional History and Symbolic Language of the Old Kingdom; 2008) and the biography “Maria Theresia: Die Kaiserin in ihrer Zeit” (Maria Theresa: the Empress in Her Times; 2017). In them, she succeeds in “making the foreignness of the early modern period vivid and understandable without abandoning the difference between then and now or describing early modernity as a phase of the ‘not yet’”.

The award ceremony is expected to take place early next year. The laudatory speech will be given by historian Prof. Dr Jürgen Osterhammel from the University of Konstanz, a “leading representative of global history”, according to the University of Bielefeld.

The early modern historian Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger has since 1997 held the Chair for Early Modern History at the University of Münster. She received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2005 and the German historian prize “Preis des Historischen Kollegs” of the Historische Kolleg in Munich in 2013. From 2011 to 2015, she was Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster and has been deputy speaker since then. She will become Director of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in September, remaining professor at the University of Münster and principal investigator of the Cluster of Excellence. Her biography about Maria Theresa has received numerous awards, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. (Bielefeld University/sca/maz)