Professor and German department Chair Karen Feldman has been awarded the Berlin Prize by The American Academy in Berlin, for her work The Rhetoric of Moralizing: On Affect, Epistemology, and “Knowing Better”.
Karen’s Academy book project considers the rhetorical, epistemic, and affective dimensions of moralizing, which she describes as “an appeal to right principles and the certainty of one’s own judgment, couched in a typically high-handed affective mode.” The project will consist of a series of essays on Western philosophical approaches to moralizing, and on contemporary treatments of moralizing within literary studies, focusing on such canonical and recent texts as Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Rei Terada’s Feeling in Theory, Eve Sedgewick’s “Paranoid Reading,” and Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique.
The Berlin Prize is awarded annually to US-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts, and music composition.