Classics' Slaveva-Griffin receives prestigious German fellowship

Associate Professor Svetla Slaveva-Griffin of the Department of Classics has received a 2013-2014 Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, a prestigious fellowship from the government of Germany.

The award will allow Slaveva-Griffin to spend 18 months, starting in January 2013, at the Institute for Philosophy at Ruhr-University Bochum in Bochum, Germany, where she will work with Professor James Wilberding, one of the leading international experts in the study of late ancient philosophy, on a project examining the interaction between philosophy and medicine in Late Antiquity.

Svetla Slaveva-Griffin

“Soon after the death of Galen, the most dominating figure in the field of medicine before Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey, a large number of philosophical and theological texts begin to engage openly with questions of medical concern for the body,” Slaveva-Griffin says. “Some of these questions included the relation between soul and body; the role of the heart in the cognitive perception of the senses; the conception of life; the hereditary make-up of offspring; and the physical and metaphysical properties of blood and pneuma.”

Slaveva-Griffin, who joined the FSU faculty in 2001, is the author of Plotinus on Number, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press, as well as numerous articles on ancient philosophy and religion.

“The results of the Humboldt project will outgrow by far the immediate benefit of producing a monograph and numerous focal studies,” Slaveva-Griffin says. “The project will shed light on one of the least understood areas of intellectual exchange in Late Antiquity when, with the systematic advance of Christianity, all major disciplines (philosophy, science, and medicine) had to respond to the transformative change of the ideological climate. The body, with all of its imperfections, once again became the main object of research interest not only for physicians but philosophers and theologians alike.”

Each year, the Humboldt Foundation awards about 600 fellowships, on a competitive basis, to experienced researchers as well as postdoctoral researchers from all over the world to pursue a long-term research project, usually from six to 18 months, at a German research institution.

In addition to the fellowship program’s goal of creating and disseminating knowledge, another major goal of the awards is to promote cooperation between German universities and top-notch scholars around the globe. Ruhr-University Bochum, the first new public university in Germany founded after World War II, is one of the largest universities in Germany and a member of the German Research Foundation.

Currently, Slaveva-Griffin is co-editing, with Pauliina Remes of Uppsala University and the University of Helsinki, Handbook of Neoplatonism, a large collection of articles presenting state-of-the-art research in late ancient philosophy, to be published by Acumen Press in 2013.

In addition to her role in the classics department, Slaveva-Griffin is a core faculty member in FSU’s program in the History and Philosophy of Science and is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Religion. To read more about her research, go to http://ofr.fsu.edu/News-and-Events/Svetla-Slaveva-Griffin-receives-Humboldt-Fellowship