DIRECTOR
Phone: +49 (0)681 302-3360
E-Mail: markus.messling@khk.uni-saarland.de
Markus Messling is professor of Romance literatures and comparative literary and cultural studies at Saarland University. Previously, he was deputy director of Centre Marc Bloch, the Franco-German research centre for social sciences and humanities, and professor of romance literatures at Humboldt University of Berlin. From 2009 to 2014 he directed the junior research group “Philology and Racism in the 19th Century” at the University of Potsdam (German Research Foundation Emmy Noether Excellence Grant). Since 2019, he has been principal investigator of the ERC consolidator grant “Minor Universality: Narrative World Productions After Western Universalism”. He is an ordinary member of Academia Europaea and has held visiting professorships and fellowships at EHESS Paris, the University of Cambridge, the School of Advanced Study/University of London, and Kobe University in Japan. Since April 2024, together with Christiane Solte-Gresser, he has been one of two directors of the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Universality After Universalism: On Francophone Literatures of the Present. Translated by Michael Thomas Taylor. Foreword by Souleymane Bachir Diagne. De Gruyter, 2023.
- Minor Universality: Rethinking Humanity after Western Universalism. Edited with Jonas Tinius. De Gruyter, 2023.
- Philology and the Appropriation of the World: Champollion’s Hieroglyphs. Revised edition, translated by Michael Thomas Taylor and Marko Pajević. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
- The Epoch of Universalism (1769–1989). Edited with Franck Hofmann. De Gruyter, 2022.
- Early Modern “New Sciences”: Inquiries into Ibn Khaldūn and Giambattista Vico. Edited with Islam Dayeh. Philological Encounters 5/1. Brill, 2020.
- Formations of the Semitic: Race, Religion, and Language in Modern European Scholarship. Edited with Islam Dayeh, Tal Hever, and Elizabeth Eva Johnston. Philological Encounters 2/3–4. Brill, 2017.
