Einladung zur Abschiedsvorlesung von Prof. em. Erhard Schüttpelz
About Erhard Schüttpelz
Erhard Schüttpelz, born in 1961 in Haldern (now Rees), studied in Hanover, Exeter, Bonn, Cologne, and Oxford (St. John’s) and received his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1994. In 1994/95, he was a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Columbia University, New York. From 1996 to 1998, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the DFG Research Training Group Theory of Literature and Communication at the University of Constance; from 1998 to 2003, he served as a research associate in preparation for, and subsequently within, the Collaborative Research Centre Media and Cultural Communication at the Universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen.
He completed his habilitation in 2003 at the University of Constance, where he served as the scientific coordinator of the research unit Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary from 2003 to 2005, funded by Albrecht Koschorke’s Leibniz Prize. In 2005, he was a Fellow at the IFK (Vienna). Since 2005, he has been Professor of Media Theory at the University of Siegen, serving as a principal investigator of the DFG Research Training Group Locating Media and the Collaborative Research Centre Media of Cooperation. From 2012 to 2016, he was an elected member of the DFG Review Board 103, and from 2018 to 2022, a member of the University Council of the University of Siegen. In addition, he held fellowships in Weimar, Constance, Berlin (FU), Münster, and at the Center for Advanced Studies – Erlangen.
His interests are philological and cultural in nature. They initially led him from structuralist literary theory to the language theory of rhetorical figures—driven by a deep sympathy for impossible syntheses that could bridge the divide between continental and analytic philosophy, for boundary crossers between disciplines, for the history of the humanities modeled on Science and Technology Studies, and for figures of transition, boundary objects, tricksters, disruptions, and images. He found his academic home in the newly emerging discipline of German media studies—of which he remarks that it is »a field I could neither have studied nor invented better myself to pursue my interest in opportunities for cooperation«.
His films and books include a film with the working title Gaabi Cirey! featuring the voice of Hanns Zischler (with Anja Dreschke and Carlo Peters), the film A Kind of World War (with Anselm Franke, 2021), online at: https://www.hkw.de/de/app/mediathek/video/84649 and the books Eine Art Weltkrieg / A Kind of World War (with Anselm Franke, Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2021), Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven. Weltliteratur und Ethnologie 1870-1960 (Munich 2005), Deutland (Berlin 2023), and Medium, Medium: Elemente einer Anthropologie (Berlin 2025). A 2002 conference at the Warburg-Haus resulted in the volume he co-edited with Cora Bender and Thomas Hensel, »Schlangenritual«. Der Transfer der Wissensformen vom Tsu’ti’kive der Hopi bis zu Aby Warburgs Kreuzlinger Vortrag (Berlin 2007).
In connection with this honor, Erhard Schüttpelz will deliver a celebratory lecture in the reading room of the Warburg-Haus, scheduled for the second half of 2026. The date will be announced along with the invitation from the Aby Warburg Foundation.
