Birgit Ulrike Münch | The Humanities Between Historical Complexity and Present-Day Tasks: Considerations of a German Art Historian, Starting out from Velázquez’s Meninas

This lecture will describe the current discussions around, and results of, the German Excellence Strategy—federal funding intended to strengthen internationally competitive, cutting-edge research—and embed them in the debates about the status, challenges, and future of the humanities at large. In doing so, Münch will focus on a specific research project with the intention of demonstrating its timeliness. This project concerns the representation of “vertically challenged” people in early modern paintings. The phenomenon is both historically and systematically fascinating because, in many early modern courts, people of short stature were a group that had access to a wide range of desirable positions and thus constituted a paradoxical interconnection between social privilege and physical challenge.

Starting from this complicated and enigmatic situation of the past, Münch will argue for a new perspective in dependency, identity, and minority studies. Instead of insisting on the usual, one-sided interpretation of physical difference as a “disadvantage,” specific cultural configurations from the past and the attention that great artists gave to them provoke a more complex and dialectical view of similar phenomena in our present-day discussions. Such considerations stemming from her work as an art historian will lead to some concluding remarks about tasks and functions of the humanities and universities at large in present-day Europe, arguing for the further development of the tradition of activating the public sphere with impulses of counter-intuitive, view-changing, and ultimately liberating thought.

Related Event: Münch will give a lecture with the Department of Art and Art History on May 29 at the McMurtry Building.

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About the Speaker

Birgit Ulrike Münch is Professor of Art History and Vice Rector for International Affairs at the University of Bonn, Germany. She is also co-director of the Centre Ernst Robert Curtius, the Center for French Studies at Bonn University, as well as head of the scientific committee of the GNM, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, the largest museum of cultural history in the in German speaking countries. Münch's research interests include early modern art, confessionalization, social art history, the juxtaposition of the arts, and medical humanities (e.g., the history of the body and illnesses, sexuality, and emotions). As PI within the only Humanities’ Cluster of Excellence in Bonn, Münch analyzes strong asymmetrical dependencies in 17th- and 18th-century Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Münch co-curated several exhibitions and is interested in innovative ways that artists and museums deal with their pasts and how monuments and memorials are recorded. Currently, she is studying the hidden visual and textual archives in the early modern era, the history of prostitution, the portrait of illness as well as concepts of reconciliation. Together with church historians Volker Leppin (Yale) and Benedikt Brunner (Mainz) she is currently finishing a companion on early modern Nuremberg for Brill publishers. She received several prestigious fellowships in France, the U.K., and the U.S., (e.g., a Senior Global Fellowship of the University of St Andrews, Scotland in 2022).

Her recent publications include The Sick Self: Some Reflections on the Self-Making of the Diseased Body as "Real Portrait Fiction," in:Wirklichkeit/Fiktion, Tübingen 2025 (in print), co-edited together with Markus Gabriel and Marion Gymnich; Long Covid - Unfortunately Not "Past." Mapping (In)Visibility Perspectives from the Medical Humanities and Art History (together with Mariacarla Gadebusch), in: In the Realm of Corona Normativities II. The Permanence of the Exception, eds. W. Gephardt and J. Leko 2022; Aby Warburg in Bonn, co-edited with Hui Luan Tran (2022), Augenlust? Niederländische Stillleben (Exhibition Catalogue 2023), Transformer le monument funéraire. Möglichkeitsräume künstlerischer Überbietung des französischen Monuments im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Co-edited with Wiebke Windorf, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net (Passages online 7), Paris 2021. 
 

About the Series

All This Rising: The Humanities in the Next Ten Years features ideas and methods that will mark new paths for the humanities in the next decade. Visitors consider the motives and conventions of their work in progress, how it converses with its discipline, and what it portends for the humanities.

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