Home Press Room Past New Items Heidelberg's "Ruprecht Karls Prize" 2009 awarded to Ines Prodöhl
Heidelberg's "Ruprecht Karl Prize" 2009 awarded to Ines Prodöhl Print E-mail

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"The Allbuch knows it all". An advertisement for the abbreviated Brockhaus, the so-called Allbuch, from the 1930s.
Research Fellow Ines Prodöhl is among this year's winners of the University of Heidelberg's Ruprecht Karl Prize, which was awarded for her dissertation "The Politics of Knowledge. German encyclopedias in the 'Third Reich', in Switzerland and in East Germany." The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Madeleine Herren.

Each year, the "Ruprecht-Karls-Preis" honors five outstanding dissertations in all fields of research at the University of Heidelberg. The university's different divisions send their nominations to the Stiftung Universität Heidelberg, which appoints an independent advisory board to select the winners. The award ceremony took take place on December 5, 2009.

Prodöhl's dissertation on the "Politics of Knowledge" analyzes general encyclopedias published in the "Third Reich", in Switzerland and in the Soviet Occupation Zone in a transnational approach. She argues that each of these German-speaking societies constructed its specific general knowledge, which is influenced more by a society's cultural self-conception than by its political power. Based on a broad understanding of politics, including both cultural and governmental power, the dissertation discusses the main German publishers of encyclopedias, the companies F. A. Brockhaus and the Bibliographisches Institut, both situated in Leipzig. It analyzes the production of knowledge by looking at authors, editors, and censors, as well as the circumstances under which the knowledge was produced. Her thesis has been published by the Akademie Verlag in Berlin.

Prodöhl is currently working on her second book, a Habilitationsschrift on soybeans in global perspective, 1900-1950.