University of Tübingen: Ancient historian Professor Mischa Meier receives the Leibniz Prize
The ancient historian Professor Mischa Meier from Tübingen receives the Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation. As the DFG announced in Bonn on Thursday, it honored Meier’s “groundbreaking work on the history of late antiquity, with which he had a lasting impact on the field of ancient history and related disciplines nationally and internationally”. Meier has been teaching as a professor at the University of Tübingen since 2004. Among other things, he is the spokesman for the Collaborative Research Center “Threatened Orders”, which deals with historical and current crises in politics, economy, society and nature, as well as the research project of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences on the world chronicle of Johannes Malalas.
“The Leibniz Prize for Mischa Meier is a great honor for the entire university and underlines the traditionally great importance of the Tübingen humanities,” said the rector of the university, Professor Bernd Engler. “Over the past decade and a half, his research has made a major contribution to sharpening the profile of historical studies in Tübingen and making the location even more visible internationally.” 6th century AD, the migration of peoples, ethnological, anthropological and folkloric approaches in ancient history, historical disaster research and the history of the effects of antiquity in music and literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Mischa Meier was born on June 13, 1971 in Dortmund. He studied classical philology, history and education at the University of Bochum, where he worked with Karl-Wilhelm Welwei in 1998 with a thesis on Sparta in the 7th century BC. PhD. In 2002 he completed his habilitation at Bielefeld University with a work on the time of the late ancient emperor Justinian. After working as a research assistant at the Universities of Bielefeld and Bonn, he was appointed to the Chair of Ancient History at the University of Tübingen in 2004. Meier also attracted attention beyond the boundaries of his subject with his book “Geschichte der Völkerwanderung”, which appeared in 2019 and is now in its 7th edition.
The ancient historian has already received several awards in recent years. In 2012 he received the Aby Warburg Foundation Prize, the Karl Christ Prize for Ancient History in 2015 and the Non-Fiction Prize of the Scientific Book Society in 2021. Since 2010 he has also been a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize is the most important research award in Germany. The aim of the Leibniz program, which was set up in 1985, is to improve the working conditions of outstanding scientists, to expand their research opportunities, to relieve them of administrative workload and to make it easier for them to employ particularly qualified young scientists. The prize is endowed with up to 2.5 million euros. A total of 17 scientists from the University of Tübingen and the Tübingen Max Planck Institute have been awarded the Leibniz Prize since 1985.