Start-up Grants for Nicolas Fink and Philipp Wegener
The Doctoral Program in Literary Studies awards one start-up scholarship each to a German and Nordic Studies scholar.
In the current round applications for start-up grants, Nicolas Fink (University of Basel) and Philipp Wegener (University of Göttingen) convinced the jury with their projects. They will each receive a one-year start-up grant of CHF 30,000, which will be used to put together and submit a competitive application for follow-up funding.
Nicolas Fink's dissertation project "Zustände des Rechts. Umstände der Rhetorik. Eine Literaturgeschichte der Feststellungsform" examines literary texts of the saddle period for their argumentative structure with regard to the influence of officia rhetoric on legal language and literature. One focus is the status doctrine, which has long been neglected by researchers.
Nicolas received his MA degree in German philology and history from the University of Basel in 2022. From 2020 to 2022, he was a student asssistant at the German Seminar with Prof. Dr. Ralf Simon. He is editor of the volume Unerhörte Auswahl vergessener Wortschönheiten aus Johann Jakob Sprengs gigantischem, im Archive gefundenen, seit 250 Jahren unveröffentlichten deutschen Wörterbuch (Verlag Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis, 2021).
In Philipp Wegener's project "Zwischen den Zeilen – Narratologische Analyse von Schriftartefakten in den Sagas," narrated written artifacts in Icelandic bishop's and contemporary sagas of the 13th and 14th centuries will be examined as things for their position and functions in the narrative text. In doing so, they will be considered both from the perspective of Material Philology and in their physicality in relation to the information stored in them through writing.
After graduating from high school in 2013, Philipp studied history and Scandinavian studies in Göttingen and Umeå until 2021, and worked for several years as a student assistant at the Göttingen academy project Germania Sacra.
Welcome, Philipp and Nicolas!