Evi Zemanek

2017 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize winner

Assistant professor Dr. Evi Zemanek of the University of Freiburg’s Deutsches Seminar is to receive the 2017 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize. Zemanek was selected by a German Research Foundation (DFG) and Federal Ministry of Education and Research committee. The 20,000 euro award is considered the biggest prize for junior researchers in Germany; ten such prizes will be given out this year. 154 researchers from across the spectrum of academic work were nominated.

Evi Zemanek has been an assistant professor for modern German literature and intermediality at the University of Freiburg since 2010. She is currently deputizing for a professor at the Institute of Media Culture Studies; she is also a research fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS).

She receives the award for her manifold comparative works on European literature and her intermediality research, particularly into the relationship between literature and graphic art. In 2010 she completed her doctoral thesis in the field, “The face in poetry. Studies of the poetic portrait.”

In 2012, Zemanek received a major grant for the DFG-backed research network “Ethics and aesthetics of literary representations of ecological transformations.” Thanks to this and other interdisciplinary and international collaborations, she is considered a pioneer of ecocriticism in Germany. The literary-artistic reception and popularization of environmental knowledge is at the heart of her latest work, such as the current monograph, “Caricatures of Nature,” about reflections on the anthropogenic transformation of the environment in German journals from the era of industrialisation. This examination of the interrelatedness of environmental, discourse, and media history seeks to connect humanities research with environmental and environmental-history research in the manner of the Environmental Humanities.