Gerhard Lauer


Gerhard Lauer is a German literary scholar. He is currently Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Basel. He has worked on literary history, digital humanities and cognitive poetics. He is known for his social cognitive approach in literary studies.
Lauer initially studied literary studies, philosophy and musicology at the Saarland University and University of Tübingen, and completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Munich. He then trained in German studies and Jewish studies. He went on to complete his Doctor of Philosophy in 1992 on the history of scholarship in exile, with Wolfgang Frühwald as his doctoral supervisor. In 2000 he defended his habilitation on the rise of the Haskalah.
In 2002 he succeeded Albrecht Schöne and Wilfried Barner as chair of Modern German Literature at the University of Göttingen. Professor Lauer is a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, was distinguished Max Kade visiting professor at the Washington University in St. Louis, senior research fellow at the Institut of Advances Studies/St Mary's College, Durham University, is a cofounding editor of the Journal of Literary Theory and associate editor of the journal Scientific Study of Literature.

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