ICYMI: Lecture by Art Historian Birgit Ulrike Münch

This lecture, recorded on May 28, 2025, describes 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 focuses 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.