High distinction awarded by the DFGProf. Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch Receives the 2026 Leibniz Prize

Photo: Katja Klein

Prof. Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch, professor of modern German literature at the University of Hamburg, receives the Leibniz Prize 2026.

Established in 1985, the Leibniz Program aims to honor outstanding top researchers, expand their research opportunities, and facilitate the employment of highly qualified researchers in the early stages of their careers. The 2026 Leibniz Prizes will be awarded at a ceremony in Berlin on 18 March 2026.

Prof. Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch will receive the Leibniz Prize for her outstanding academic achievements in eighteenth and nineteenth century German literature, in particular the relationship between knowledge, science, and literature. “How do literature and science interact with each other?” This question is addressed by the poetics of knowledge—a field to which Cornelia Zumbusch has made a number of new and decisive contributions with her research, according to the DFG’s announcement. In her studies of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, Zumbusch has shown how literature interlinks modern-day knowledge with millennia-old formal, pictorial and genre traditions. Her recently published monograph on “romantic thermodynamics” is an impressive account of the ways in which literature is involved in shaping the current debate on energy. Zumbusch is among the most productive and internationally acclaimed literary scholars of her generation, and her reputation reaches far beyond the field of German studies.

In 2012, Prof. Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch accepted the professorship for modern German literature with a focus on eighteenth and nineteenth century literature at the University of Hamburg. She has been co-director of the Warburg House since 2015 and spokesperson for the DFG Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences “Imaginaries of Force” since March 2019. She has held visiting professorships in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at Harvard University (Spring 2020) and at the German Department of the University of California at Berkeley (Autumn 2023).

Born in Kabul (Afghanistan) in 1972, Zumbusch studied modern German literature, English studies, philosophy, and art history in Tübingen and Berlin. From 2000 to 2002, Prof. Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch was a scholarship holder in the DFG research training group “The Staging of the Body” at the Freie Universität Berlin. She then received the Aby Warburg Foundation’s research prize in 2006 for her dissertation Wissenschaft in Bildern. Symbol und dialektisches Bild in Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne-Atlas und Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk.

Starting in 2003, she worked in the Institut für Deutsche Philologie at LMU Munich, where she completed her Habilitation in 2009 with her book Die Immunität der Klassik. Reinheit, Schutz und Unempfindlichkeit bei Schiller und Goethe. From 2010 to 2012, Zumbusch taught at the University of Konstanz, and in Winter Semester 2012 she conducted research as a guest of the director at the IFK (International Research Center for Cultural Studies, University of Art and Design Linz) in Vienna.

Prof. Dr. Hauke Heekeren, president of the University of Hamburg stated, “I would like to congratulate Cornelia Zumbusch on this outstanding award. The Leibniz Prize recognizes her excellent research, which has enriched literary studies far beyond her own field. Her work exemplifies the interdisciplinary strength and vibrant humanities at Universität Hamburg—University of Excellence.”

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Previous recipients of the Leibniz Prize at the University of Hamburg: Prof. Dr. Henry Chapman (2015), Prof. Dr. Brigitte Röder (2013), Prof. Dr. Christian Büchel (2011), Prof. Dr. Thomas Hengartner (2002), and Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Jentsch (1995).