Joachim Grage

Fellowship 2013

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Joachim Grage, born in 1966, studied Chemistry, German and Scandinavian Literatures at the Universities in Marburg, Göttingen, and Copenhagen. In 1999, he obtain his PhD with a thesis about the discovery of the sea in Scandinavian literature of the 17th and 18th century. From 1996 to 2002, he was Assistant at the University of Göttingen and then from 2002 to 2008 Assistant Professor in Scandinavian Studies in Göttingen. Since 2008, he is Full Professor in Scandinavian Studies and Director of the Institute for Scandinavian Studies, University of Freiburg. Between 2011 and 2012, he was Internal Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). Since 2013, he is the Dean of Students of the Faculty of Philology.
Recent publications: with Stephan Michael Schröder (ed.): Milieus, Akteure, Medien. Zur Vielfalt literarischer Praktiken um 1900. 2013; with Stephan Michael Schröder (ed.): Literarische Praktiken in Skandinavien um 1900. Fallstudien. 2012; (ed.): Beiträge zur Wissens- und Wahrnehmungsgeschichte des Meeres in der frühen Neuzeit. 2012. Co-editor of the German Søren Kierkegaard Edition.

Building the North with words. Geographies of scientific knowledge in European philologies 1850–1950

Fellows Fribourg-Strasbourg: Joachim Grage et Thomas Mohnike
Post-doctorant : Michael Riessler

Article in the Uni Wissen, January 2015

The project analyzes the use of the languages, cultures and literatures of Scandinavia in France, Germany and Scandinavia in three developing branches of academic knowledge – comparative philology, literary history and Sami studies – between 1850 and 1950. In these fields, academics depicted the North often either as the home of liberty, the last wilderness, a refugium of melancholy or birthplace of an industrious Germanic warrior culture, that opposed to Southern superficialness and laziness. These imaginative geographies of the North were evidently depending on political contexts and local needs and were not the same in Freiburg, Strasbourg, Copenhagen or Paris.
The project proposes to analyze thus 1) the changing and conflicting versions of imaginative geographies that the actors of the field evoked by using Scandinavian literatures and cultures and 2) how these seemingly delocalized scientific models depended on ever different (political, didactic, esthetic, ideological, formal...) local needs and practices – on venues, regions and cultural circulation, to speak with Livingstone.
The project proposes thus the first distinctly transnational dynamic geography of scientific knowledge of the North as not only a history of a scientific discourse, but also as a result of doing and performing scientific work.