Consortium

Klaus Aringer

The European music history of the 18th century proves to be a gravitational center in which many older influences were brought to a climax and conclusion and at the same time countless, long-lasting innovations were initiated on many levels. In the 18th century, essential genres of instrumental music such as the solo concerto, symphony and string quartet emerged anew, opera became a forum for artistic-aesthetic raison d'être and controversy, and public music performance gradually established itself alongside private performance in increasingly larger spaces, attracting an ever more diversified audience. As a result of Enlightenment ideas, music abandoned the functional status it had enjoyed for centuries and developed into an art in its own right. The history of music in the 18th century is characterized by a wealth of fascinating protagonists (increasingly including women) and many still unexplored or little contextualized local sources, inviting intensive study.

Institute 12 Oberschützen

Simone De Angelis

Professor Simone De Angelis researches the relationship between the history and philosophy of science and medicine between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, with a particular focus on the sciences of nature (Galileo's observations of the moon, Newtonian physics, physiology, anatomy, the 'sciences of life'). Another important aspect of his research is the 'sciences of man', natural history between 1750 and 1800 and the relationship between natural and human history. As part of the profile area Dimensions of Europe, he also researches concepts and discourses of Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries, with a particular focus on the relationship of the Enlightenment to Islam and the 'historical West'.

Center for the History of Science, Graz

Klaus-Dieter Ertler

Klaus-Dieter Ertler deals with the journalistic genre of the "Spectators" or moral weeklies, which began in England at the beginning of the 18th century and soon spread throughout Europe before becoming an important indicator of the discourse system of the Enlightenment. Our multi-year projects aimed to create a central database for all European moral weeklies. Currently, representations and analyses of Spanish, Italian and French texts are available. Numerous perspectives of the levels of representation and narrative forms are made visible.

Institute for Romance Studies, Graz

Robert Felfe

Important focuses of my work as an art historian and my own research projects are dedicated to the numerous connections and interactions between the visual arts and knowledge in the early modern period. A particular emphasis lies on the history of collecting from the 16th to the 18th century. This includes studies of images and their role in the communication of encyclopaedic concepts, the systematic interweaving of the arts, nature and history, and - especially in the 18th century - the tendencies towards an increasing differentiation of the individual areas of knowledge and disciplines. These topics and aspects are linked to research on the epistemology of images, as well as on constellations of artistic practice, art theory and aesthetics.

Institute for Art and Musicology, Graz

Harald Heppner

Specialist interests: Europe's southeast in the long 18th century and its role on the continent, head of several research projects on this topic. Chairman of the Austrian Society for the Study of the 18th Century 1994-2001, local coordinator of the 13th International Congress for 18th Century Studies 2011 at the University of Graz; speaker of the doctoral program 2009-2014 and 2018-2024; chairman of the Society for the Study of the 18th Century in Southeastern Europe at the University of Graz 2016-2025.

Southeast European History/Institute for History, Graz

Sabine Jesner

Dr. Sabine^Jesner is a Southeast European historian with a research focus on the military and medical history of the long 18th century. Before joining the Institute of Military History / Museum of Military History [bmlv] in 2024, she worked as a project manager (PI) and senior lecturer at the Department of Southeast European History and Anthropology [SOEGA] at the University of Graz. She is an expert on the Habsburg military frontier, civilian and military health systems and public health as well as the development of pre-modern "medical spaces" such as quarantine stations and invalid houses.

Military Institute/Museum of Military History [bmlv], Vienna

Alois Kernbauer

The period around 1600, which is often referred to as the "Scientific Revolution", marked the beginning of a period in European intellectual, cultural and scientific history that led to the decisive changes of the 18th century. (A. Kernbauer, "Revolutio" around 1600, 2020).

From the middle of the 18th century, new reading cultures, educational and knowledge horizons emerged, which had an increasingly transformative effect on the lifestyles of all people, indirectly also on those of the initially still largely uneducated classes. This was all the more significant as changes were simultaneously taking place in the socio-economic and state-administrative spheres, which - not least as a result of accelerating population growth - led to the disintegration of existing orders, which were replaced by new structures. Essential questions of human existence and social coexistence were gradually redefined.

In the intellectual sphere, this led to new cultures of knowledge, which developed into proto-scientific forms and from which the modern scientific disciplines emerged in the 19th century under the influence of new scientific methods: From "technology" in Johann Beckmann's sense (A. Kernbauer, Beckmanns Allgemeine Technologie. Herrn Hofrath Beckmanns Vorlesungen über die Technologie, 2002) became the technical sciences, forest science became forest science (A. Kernbauer, Wald und Forst - von der Waldkunde zur Forstwissenschaft. Nachhaltigkeit, Wirtschaftswachstum und Fortschrittswille als Triebkräfte für die Entstehung einer Wissenschaftsdisziplin, 2022), mining science emerged from mining science and so on.
This development had far-reaching consequences and was reflected, among other things, in the educational institutions, whose curricula were changed in line with scientific developments in order to take new findings into account; in the 19th century, the secondary schools and academies of the 18th century became universities of the new type, the symbol of science, which emerged as the fourth productive force alongside labor, land and capital.

Institute for History, Graz

Rudolf Meer

Specialization (AOS): Immanuel Kant, Pre-History of the Scientific World View, Neo-Kantianism, Women in Science interests (AOC): Enlightenment Studies, Realism/Antirealism, Theories of the Imagination, Integrated History and Philosophy of Science

Rudolf Meer received his doctorate with distinction from the University of Graz in 2017. After a postdoctoral position at the University of Graz, he was a Marie Curie STAR Fellow at the University of Siegen. Since March 2024, Rudolf Meer has been PI of the DFG-funded project Alois Riehl's Critical Realism: Spatial and Temporal Foundations of Science (project number: 521640504).

Much of his recent work and ongoing projects deal with the history of philosophical ideas and the philosophical analysis of science, in particular the sources of scientific philosophy. In his recent work he has examined the historical implications of Maupertuis' principle of least action, the history of the development of psycho-physical monism, the possibility of critical realism based on Kant, and the relationship between Mach and Riehl.

The history and philosophy of science of the 18th century are therefore at the center of his interdisciplinary research.

Website Rudolf Meer

Center for the History of Science, Graz

Christian Neuhuber

Christian Neuhuber, Associate Professor of Modern German-Language Literature, studied German language and literature, stage, film and other media, art history and German as a foreign language in Graz. One of his main areas of research is the (mainly Austrian) literature of the Baroque period with a focus on intermediality, edition philology, theater history and dialect culture, with a focus on source-based work, archive research, manuscript expertise, edition philological aspects, interdisciplinary approaches and historical contextualization. Current publication: Graz and the professional theater in the 17th century (2024).

Institute for German Studies(Franz Nabl Institute for Literary Research), Graz

Yvonne Völkl

Yvonne Völkl studied French philology in Graz, Paris and Montreal. In 2011, she completed her doctorate on the topic of Jewish memory discourses in Quebec's francophone migration literature (Peter Lang, 2013). In her habilitation project, she investigated the gendered production of knowledge and the world in 18th-century French- and Spanish-language moral weeklies (transcript, 2022). She is co-editor of several publications, including Discourses on Economy in the Spectators / Discours sur l'économie dans les spectateurs together with K.-D. Ertler and S. Baudry (Dr. Kovač, 2018); Observations - Beobachtungen zu Literatur und Moral in der Romania und den Amerikas with A. Göschl (LIT, 2019); Storytelling in the Spectators / Storytelling dans les spectateurs with K.-D. Ertler, E. Hobisch, A. Fuchs, H. Fernández (Peter Lang, 2020) and Pandemic Protagonists. Viral (Re)Actions in Pandemic and Corona Fictions (transcript, 2023) with J. Obermayr and E. Hobisch.

Institute for Romance Studies, Graz

Ingeborg Zechner

As a musicologist, Ingeborg Zechner deals with multimedia forms of music theater in the 18th century (Italian and French opera and ballet) in their socio-cultural, political and economic contexts as well as with questions of music and mobility or music and mediality. The research project "GuDiE - Digital Edition of Philipp Gumpenhuber's Theater Chronicles", which runs from 2024 to 2028, is dedicated to the creation of a digital edition of a Viennese theater chronicle from the years 1758 to 1763.

Project blog Ingeborg Zechner

Institute for Art and Musicology, Graz

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