Henrike Lähnemann


Henrike Lähnemann is a German medievalist and has held the Chair of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the University of Oxford since 2015. She is a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Career

Lähnemann is the daughter of the theologian, and the granddaughter of the German medievalist :de:Eleonore Dörner and the archeologist Friedrich Karl Dörner; she grew up in Lüneburg and Nuremberg, Germany. She studied German literature, History of Art and Theology at the University of Bamberg, the University of Edinburgh, Free University of Berlin and University of Göttingen. After a PhD at the Universität Bamberg on late medieval didactic literature, Lähnemann worked at the University of Tübingen, where she gained her Venia legendi in German Philology with a study of the Book of Judith in German medieval literature. She spent a year as a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and a semester as Visiting Professor at the University of Zurich. Between 2006 and 2014 she held the Chair of German Studies at Newcastle University, and was also Head of the German Section in Newcastle's School of Modern Languages. Since 2015 she has held the Chair of Medieval German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.
Her research focuses on medieval manuscripts, the relationship of text and images and how vernacular and Latin literature are connected, currently mainly in late medieval Northern German convents. At the moment she is working on a Gerda Henkel Stiftung funded project to edit the letters of the nuns from Lüne, and the edition of prayer-books of the Medingen Convent.A major theme is the engagement with the Reformation.
2015-2024, she holds a Senior Research Fellowship at the FRIAS, made possible by the generous co-funding of the Chair by the VolkswagenStiftung, the DAAD, and the University of Freiburg.
In 2010, the German Research Foundation nominated her for, the database of profiles of leading women scientists; she also chaired Women in German Studies 2009-2015. The Author Angelika Overath, with whom she has been working productively over the last years, dedicated her new novel called Sie dreht sich um to Lähnemann.

Research Projects

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