Racha Kirakosian receives “Momentum Funding” from the Volkswagen Foundation
Freiburg, 11/04/2025
Prof. Dr. Racha Kirakosian, Chair of German Medieval Studies at the University of Freiburg’s German Department has been awarded the Volkswagen Foundation‘s Momentum – Funding for Recently Tenured Professors. This offers her the opportunity to advance the content-related and strategic development of her professorship.
The funding is aimed at professors three to five years after taking up their first tenured professorship and supports innovative approaches in research and teaching. Kirakosian’s research is dedicated to religious cultural history and textual history of the Middle Ages. She plans to use the “momentum funding” to expand her research to include scientific discourses of the Middle Ages.
Kirakosian has been teaching in Freiburg since 2020 and was honoured in 2022 for her excellent doctoral supervision. In the same year, Kirakosian’s research on “Neuromedievalism” was named the winner of the Falling Walls Winner Prize in the category of Social Sciences & Humanities. In 2023, she received the Electronic Instructional Development Award. Kirakosian is a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin until the end of July 2025.
“As part of the Momentum project, I would like to expand my research to include scientific discourses of the Middle Ages. In doing so, I hope to uncover the forms of knowledge transfer of the time, thus contributing to an inclusive history of science.”
Prof. Dr. Racha Kirakosian
Chair of German Medieval Studies at the University of Freiburg’s German Department
To this end, a largely untapped corpus of dialogue-oriented texts from the period between approximately 1150 and 1650 AD will be digitised and then evaluated from a historiographical and data science perspective in order to expand our knowledge of scientific discourse in the Middle Ages with the insights gained from it. In addition, a new dialogue-based teaching format is to be developed in cooperation with the Universities of Stockholm and Strasbourg.