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CRC 644: Research profile (short version)

The Collaborative Research Centre »Transformations of Antiquity« unites eleven disciplines from the social sciences and humanities at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as well as one each at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Ca. 60 scholars, representing five faculties altogether, work in 16 projects.
Four study groups examining different thematic foci are at heart of the CRC’s interdisciplinary work. A central Integrated Research Training Group (Integriertes Graduiertenkolleg, IGK) supports the work of the CRC’s doctoral students.

Project goals

We examine

1. the constitutive functions of antiquity in the emergence of the European scientific society and its disciplines;
2. the role of antiquity in the genesis of medieval, modern, and modernist cultural identities and self-constructions; and
3. the artistic and literary forms and the roles of translation and media in this transformation.

Central on each of these three levels of our project are processes that transformed and transform both the cultures origin (›reference domain‹) and the different target cultures (›domain of reception‹). Another focus of our work is to establish interdisciplinary networks integrating our various research projects. Past research into antiquity itself and its reception, though plentiful, has been largely compartmentalized: studies in the productive appropriations and transformations of the ancient sciences and arts during the slow emergence of the system of the sciences and the cultural self-constructions of the European societies, a process that extends from the Middle Ages into modernity, have made little sustained effort to embed these appropriations and transformations in their interdisciplinary contexts. The CRC aims to lay the theoretical foundations for this interdisciplinary and contextual map of the transformations of antiquity, and to perform exemplary studies of selected topics.

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