Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study
Germany
fellow
Eva Horn
2025-2026
Home institution
University of Vienna
Country of origin (home institution)
Austria
Discipline(s)
Literature
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Eva Horn is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Department of German at the University of Vienna, Austria. She studied Comparative, German and French Literature, and Philosophy at the Universities of Bielefeld, Konstanz and at the Sorbonne I, Paris. She held Post-Doc positions at Konstanz and the Europa-Universität, Frankfurt/Oder, and was a professor at the the University of Basel.
Together with the geologist Michael Wagreich, she is the founder and director of the Vienna Anthropocene Network. Since 2024, she is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group. She is a member at the Academia Europaea. As a visiting professor, she has taught at NYU, Columbia, the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and NTNU Taiwan.
She has been a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center and the Wissenschaftschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2020 she received the Heinrich Mann-Prize by the German Academy of the Arts.
Research Project
The Sublime, the Uncanny, the Epic, the Tragic, the Comedic, the Elegiac, the Apocalyptic: Modes of an Aesthesis of the Anthropocene
Eva Horn’s project as HIAS revolves around a set of aesthetic modes that could be elements of an aesthetic of the Anthropocene, such as the Epic, the Sublime, the Uncanny, the Tragic, the Comedic, the Elegiac, and the Apocalyptic.
As forms of aesthetic experience and representation they are not bound to a specific medium or genre. These modes can constitute an “aesthesis” that would allow for an access to the profoundly altered world of the Anthropocene.
Research Interests:
Anthropocene; Cultural History; Aesthetic Perceptions of Climate