Mara R. Wade, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, is one of two recipients of the 2018 Reimar Lüst Award. This award is granted to humanities scholars and social scientists from outside Germany who, through their research, have shaped academic and cultural relations between Germany and their own countries.
Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in collaboration with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation grants up to two Reimar Lüst Awards. The other recipient this year is historian Ulinka Rublack at St. John's College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Wade’s research focus is on the Early Modern Period of German history. She has achieved international recognition particularly in the areas of emblem research, research on European aristocratic and festival culture, gender research and with her research on the urban culture of Nuremberg.
Wade is also regarded as a representative of the digital humanities, having developed Emblematica Online, an internationally established database of collections of books on emblems. Her collaboration with the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) through her Reimar Lüst Award is expected to strengthen, for example, research on festival culture and on literature and theatre culture in Nuremberg in the 17th century.
Emblematica Online is hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and its founding partner is the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. For more about Emblematica Online, visit http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu/.