Sigrid Weigel (born March 25, 1950, Hamburg) is a German scholar of literary studies, critical theory, a specialist of cross-disciplinary research, and a leading scholar of Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and the cultural science (Kulturwissenschaft) around 1900. She held professorships at Hamburg, Zürich, and Berlin and established the internationally noted Advanced Studies “Center for Literary and Cultural Research” (ZfL, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung) in Berlin. In 2016, she received the renowned Aby Warburg Prize of the City of Hamburg. Career Weigel received her Ph.D. in 1977 from University of Hamburg and her habilitation in 1986 from Marburg University. Since 1978 she taught Literary Studies at Hamburg University, where she was appointed professor in 1984. As member of the director's board of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen from 1990 to 1993 she conducted interdisciplinary fellow groups on ‘memory research’ and 'topography of gender'. From 1993 to 1998 she served as professor at Zürich University, where she initiated an annual poetry lecture (W. G. Sebald presented his "Air Warfare and Literature" here in 1997) and public university lectures responding to Switzerland's “Nazi gold affair”. From 1998 to 2000 she acted as the director of the Einstein Forum Potsdam. From 1999 to 2015 she was professor at the Technical University Berlin and director of the independent Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin (ZfL), which during this period developed "into a prominent, nationally and internationally acknowledged research center [...] and a leading place in Germany for theoretical discussions in the humanities between approaches of historic philology and cultural science , on the one hand, and for an interdisciplinary approach to natural and technical sciences on the other" (German Science Council, 2006). She founded the semi-annual journal Trajekte and a program of prominent Honorary Members (Ginzburg, Kristeva, Didi-Huberman, Bhabha et al.). The center is an example of successful collaboration between the academic cultures of East and West Germany, because scholars of the former GDR-Academy of Sciences formed research teams in collaboration with scholars from the old FRG. Weigel regularly gives guest seminars, summer courses, and PhD-workshops abroad; from 2005 to 2016 she served as permanent Visiting Professor at the German Dept. of Princeton University. Scholarship / Ideas Literary Studies Her early publications are dedicated to non-canonized genres (leaflet-literature of 1848-revolution, prisoners’ literature). Her still influential writings on gender theory and the literary history of female authors (e.a. the