The annual Prawer lecture promotes the work of outstanding postgraduate students working on any aspect of literature, culture and history in the German-speaking world from 1700-1900. The first lecture was held in the academic year 2021-22. Each year, the winner will be invited to address the EGS, and the lecture published in a subsequent issue of PEGS. In addition, the lecture carries a cash prize of £300.

Graduate students registered at any higher education institution worldwide are invited to send abstracts of up to 500 words to Tobias Heinrich (t.heinrich@kent.ac.uk), Charlotte Lee (cll38@cam.ac.uk) and Charlie Louth (charlie.louth@queens.ox.ac.uk) by Friday 27 June, 2025. Enquiries may also be directed to these addresses.

Please note that applicants will need to be registered as a student on 1 October 2024 in order to be eligible.

RACHEL WONG (Chicago)

Oceanic Resonances in Schiller’s Ring des Polykrates

SARAH FENGLER (Oxford)

Gessner’s Voegel, Klopstock’s Frühlingswürmchen, and Lavater’s Schmetterling. Metaphors of Mortality and Metamorphosis in Eighteenth-Century Religious Literature

ANHAD ARORA (Oxford)

Fanny Mendelssohn’s ‘Divan’

Siegbert Salomon Prawer (1925-2012) taught at Birmingham, at Westfield College, London, and at Oxford, where he was Taylor Professor of German between 1969 and 1987. He and his sister Ruth (later Ruth Prawer Jhabvala) had fled Germany in 1939. Siegbert Prawer was a scholar of immense breadth, his work ranging from poetry to film, from Heine to Marx, and beyond German studies to comparative literature. He was President of the EGS from 1998 to 2003. The naming of the lecture pays tribute to Siegbert Prawer’s charisma as a speaker and to his unflagging encouragement of students and younger scholars.

In written correspondence, he would often accompany his signature with a doodled self-portrait.