Coralie Rippl-Uhlenhut

Coralie Rippl-Uhlenhut is Acting Professor for German Philology, with special emphasis on the literary history of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, at the Chair of German Philology, Senior Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Würzburg. She is also a private lecturer (Privatdozentin) with the venia legendi in German Literature up to 1700.

She earned her M.A. in German Philology, Art History and Modern German Literature (2000–2006) and her doctorate summa cum laude in 2011, both from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. In 2023 she completed her habilitation at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Zürich.

Her research centres on medieval and early-modern German literature approached through historical narratology, comparative literature, gender studies and the interplay between law, religion and narrative. Key thematic foci include constructions of time and space, the poetics of Minnesang and Sangspruch, widow figures as cultural models, and the narrative strategies of authors such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartmann von Aue and Heinrich Kaufringer.

Her recent publications investigate temporal aspects of doubt in courtly epic, narrative dynamics in the Erec romances of Chrétien and Hartmann, and the intersection of courtly love with Christian allegory. Overall, her corpus of articles demonstrates a consistent engagement with how medieval texts negotiate identity, gender and authority through sophisticated narrative techniques.

While no major awards are explicitly listed, she has obtained competitive fellowships and research grants from the DFG Graduate School, University of Zürich Forschungskredit, and career-development funding from the German Seminar Zürich. She has co-organised several international conferences, notably on medieval narrative synchronisation and the emergence of narrative concepts around 1200.

Currently she leads two research projects: Alter(n) in Minnesang und Sangspruch (age and identity in medieval lyric) and Witwen, Turteltauben (tracing the literary figure of the widow in pre-modern Europe). She is also an editor of the journal Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (PBB) and an active member of the Wolfram von Eschenbach-Gesellschaft, the Germanistenverband and the International Medievalists’ Colloquium.

Teaching commitments for the winter term 2024/25 are listed in the University of Würzburg course catalogue, and she is integrated into the DFG priority programme “Translation Cultures of the Early Modern Period” and the Würzburg College “Middle Ages and Early Modern Period”.