Susanne Rau wins Thuringian Research Award

Susanne Rau has won the Thüringer Forschungspreis 2023. She is one of the spokespersons of the DFG-funded Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies (Kollegforschungsgruppe, KFG) “Religion and Urbanity”. She received the award for her innovative work on spatial history. Her work has shown that we understand societies better when we analyze their spatial dimensions and shed light on their historical development. This applies to past societies that help shape our present, as well as to present-day foreign cultures with which we relate – whether through trade, travel, migration, or comparison and evaluation.

“Professor Susanne Rau, has made the category ‘space’ fruitful for the analysis of historical societies and thus given historical science a visible place in the debate, which until then had been dominated by the social sciences,” reads the justification for the award of the 2023 Thuringian Research Award. Building on this, she has developed a method for researching historical spatialities that also takes temporalities into account, and has thus decisively established historical-cultural spatial research. This method, which she developed in a dialectical process of historical source studies and critical examination of spatial theories, has led to a new understanding of spatial concepts and practices in cities since the late Middle Ages.

The award was covered by the TV station MDR, including an interview with Susanne Rau (click on the image to watch the video):

Furthermore, the award featured in the newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Zeit as well as the university of Erfurt’s wepage.

On Twitter, the award was also covered by a range of institutions and individuals, a selection of which you can see below:

Congratulations, Susanne Rau!

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