Richter, Sandra

Among Sandra Richter’s areas of research are the history of ideas in literature and the literary history of ideas: no wonder the only thirty-five year old professor has made her way through the German research landscape with a wealth of ideas. Her motto is: “No one is worth his salt as a scholar who is seeking only a well-paid and prestigious job. Scholarship is impossible without a considerable enthusiasm for research and teaching.”

The young literary scholar has made her academic career against opposition, and with a breath-taking tempo. At twenty-five, Sandra Richter, née Pott, took her PhD in Modern German Literature; at twenty-nine, she had her habilitation. From 2001 to 2003, she worked as Visiting Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Germanic Studies of the University of London and as Professeur invité at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS/ENS) in Paris. After that, she headed for five years an Emmy Noether junior staff research group of the German Research Foundation, which studied how poems from the eighteenth to the twentieth century influenced the development of style and aesthetics. Since 2008, Richter has been Professor for Modern German Literature at the University of Stuttgart. In addition, she is now a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London, where she was also appointed to a Professorship a year ago.

Flair for gaps and connections

In her interdisciplinary work, Richter studies forgotten authors and gaps in the history of the humanities. Two of these areas are moral teachings in France and Germany during the eighteenth century and the secularisation of the sciences since the Renaissance. She approaches these studies by attempting to sceptically resuscitate a world view and conduct of life determined by ideals. “Sceptically”, Richter says, “because much political injustice has gone under the name of ideals”. Yet she is convinced of the necessity for ideals and ideas in order to bring individuals and societies in a multi-polar world into dialogue and in order to solve problems.

The scholarly community has steadily honoured Richter’s outstanding contributions: in June 2005, she was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the German Research Foundation (endowed with 16,000 euros); two years later the Philip Leverhulme Prize (endowed with 70,000 pounds); and with the latter, a grant of 100,000 euros from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach-Stiftung to encourage her return to Germany.

Enthusiasm for one’s own enthusiasm

Richter has not let all the praise and fame, all the enthusiasm for research and teaching, go to her head. “Success of course is also dependent on quite different, enthusiasm-dampening factors”, she explains, quite down-to-earth, “for example, a lot of work, fighting against frustration, and stubbornness”. But she adds: “Without enthusiasm for the subject, one can stand the uncertainties and dry spells of the qualification process as little as all the administrative work that today unfortunately is part of the scholar’s job.”

Sandra Richter is young, dynamic and successful. And she is one of the (very few) women who hold a professorship in Germany. “Enthusiasm is gender neutral”, she says. She thinks many women, however, lack the courage to let others catch their enthusiasm, which is much easier to do for men. “But a successful woman must do exactly that, and be able to bear up under criticism.” Moreover, even in the academic environment child-care is a great problem in linking profession and family. This problem, she says, urgently needs a solution. “Because we need women in scholarship and science as much as we need their children.”

Independent thinking is in demand

In spite of the prevailing conditions and the uncertainties besetting the career of a young scholar, Richter would run her academic steeplechase again. She dates the time of her doctoral dissertation to the “academic stone age”, whose “self-imposed solitary confinement” was intense and productive, but also often destructive. The contemporary trend towards the professionalisation of academic careers both pleases and shocks the Professor. “I would have liked to try things out in internships and workshops as doctoral candidates now do. But I fear that the new over-all supervision can generate an intellectual and personal streamlining of the sort that we don’t need, especially in the humanities. Because there is one thing that structured programmes can’t teach: independent thinking.”

Ideal and competition

At present, Richter is working on two books. Under the title Optimismus. Eine Streitschrift gegen seine Verächter (i.e., Optimism. A Polemic Against Its Despisers), she treats a central neo-idealist idea, whereas Wettbewerb. Eine ideengeschichtliche Therapie für seine Befürworter und Kritiker (i.e., Competition. A Therapy Drawn from the History of Ideas for Its Advocates and Critics) describes rather a non-idealistic idea. Through both, Sandra Richter will again give expression not only to her own idealism and optimism, but also to her down-to-earthness.

Book tips: Sandra Pott: Reformierte Morallehren und schöne Literatur von Jean Barbeyrac bis Christoph Martin Wieland (Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 2003). 308 pages, € 78,00; ISBN: 3518291718 Sandra Pott: Säkularisierung in den Wissenschaften seit der frühen Neuzeit, vol. 1: Medizin, Medizinästhetik und schöne Literatur (Walter de Gruyter Verlag, Berlin, 2001). 284 pages, € 82,00; ISBN: 3110172666