Gerda Henkel Scholarship for Jonas Grethlein
Prof. Dr. Jonas Grethlein of Heidelberg University’s Department of Classical Languages and Literature has been selected to receive the Gerda Henkel Scholarship 2010. The prize, awarded by the foundation of the same name, will support Professor Grethlein’s sabbatical at Brown University in Providence (USA). From September 2010 to May 2011, he will be working in Providence on a research project devoted to the narrative strategies of ancient historiographers entitled “Futures Past in Ancient Historiography”.
The scholarship for Brown University has been awarded every two years since 2004 to outstanding scholars working in the field of ancient history. The Gerda Henkel Foundation promotes academic exchange between scholars from the United States and German-speaking countries. Professor Grethlein, chair of Greek literary studies in Heidelberg, will be working at the Department of Classics. His research project explores the space where historical theory, narratology and classical philology converge. He examines the question of how historians such as Herodotus or Tacitus came to terms with the fact that they had no choice but to write after the event. Did they make use of the hindsight conferred by their privileged temporal perspective or did they try to render the past as it was experienced by the historical actors?
Johannes Grethlein (b. 1978) studied Greek, Latin and history at Göttingen, Oxford (UK) and Freiburg. In 2002 he received his doctorate from Freiburg University with a dissertation on the construction of collective identity in Greek tragedy. In 2005 followed his Habilitation at the same university and the “venia legendi” for classical languages and literature and ancient history. His Habilitation thesis was on the image of history in the Iliad. In 2006 Johannes Grethlein was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Council. After two years at Harvard University, he was assistant professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara in 2007 before accepting a professorship at Heidelberg University in 2008.