Paul Reitter, professor of German, and director of the Humanities Institute, is one of 21 scholars, writers and artists awarded a coveted 2017-18 Berlin Prize — a semester-long fellowship — by the American Academy in Berlin. Fellows receive a monthly stipend and accommodations at the academy’s lakeside Hans Arnhold Center in Berlin-Wannsee, and the time and resources to work on academic projects.

In spring 2018, Humboldt Universität’s archives will provide Reitter’s project the material to examine interactions between the humanities and bureaucratic rationalization, secularization, and democratization in 19th-century Germany. From a set of specific historical reconstructions detailing the ways in which German administrative and academic orders helped or hindered one another, Reitter aims to better understand contemporary crises of the humanities in American universities.