Slowness and attention to individual objects are crucial methodological foundations of scholarship in the humanities. Both are bound up with a promise of precision and adequacy. In the area of provenance research and restitution, humanities-based work linked to collections faces political, legal, and ethical pressure—especially in light of decades of delayed restitution claims now being made by the heirs of individuals and groups who suffered injury. What is the relationship between fundamental methodological choices, the speed of scholarship, and cultural-political dynamics? Given limited resources, is it time to reconsider our methods? The project explores the historical complicity of humanities research in contexts of injustice, the responsibilities born by perpetrator societies, and the possibilities for reparations beyond case-by-case restitution.
PROF. DR. MARCEL LEPPER
CURRICULUM VITAE
Since 2021, Marcel Lepper has been an honorary professor of modern German literature at the University of Leipzig, and since 2024, he has served as the director of the Rilke Foundation in Sierre (Switzerland). From 2005 to 2018, he led the research department and the working group for the study of the history of German studies at the German Literature Archive in Marbach. Between 2018 and 2020, he directed the Literature Archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. From 2020 to 2022, he was the director of the Goethe and Schiller Archive at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and from 2023 to 2024, the managing director of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich. He has been invited as a scholar to institutions including the University of Kent, the University of Canterbury, Princeton University, and the University of Cambridge. He was a key member of the Suhrkamp Research Group (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation) and a member of the academic board of the research alliance Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel (BMBF). Among other positions, he is currently the chairman of the board of trustees of the Schloss Wiepersdorf Cultural Foundation in Brandenburg.
