The program for the summer semester 2020 has been published. Unfortunately, when it was completed at the beginning of March, we could not foresee that the events associated with the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen would overtake our plans in such a way. Now, several of the events available have already been cancelled or postponed. This applies, for example, to the Horst Antes exhibition, which the Franz Marc Museum wanted to stage with us and which we are now postponing to the winter semester. We must therefore ask you to check our website for the current status of the event you are interested in. At CAS, we will now use the summer semester in particular to continue working intensively with our Focus and Research Groups, which, thanks to digital technologies, is also possible in the current situation. We look forward to continuing to present the results of our work to you. more

"Metre is time heard" wrote critic and philosopher E.S. Dallas in 1853. But conceptions of time saw rapid revisions in the course of the 19th century. Artificial light reduced people's dependence on the natural diurnal cycle. Instead, daily life was ever more precisely governed by clocks and railway timetables. Great Britain was the first country to introduce a national time, abolishing a multiplicity of local times. Moreover, the Victorians experienced their century as an age of constant, accelerating and all-encompassing change. What does it mean for poetry as a temporal art, when time becomes ever more abstract and is ever more precisely measured by mechanical means? When its pivotal status as a resource in a capitalist system of exchange becomes ever more important? When the permanent truths poetry traditionally liked to evoke are crumbling? These questions are lying at the heart of the research of Junior Researcher in Residence Dr. Irmtraud Huber. more

Barbara Ercolano (astrophysics) and Klaus H. Goetz (political science) are spokespersons of the two new CAS Research Groups. Barbara Ercolano's group will react to the latest observation programs that have demonstrated the existence of an overwhelming richness of extra-solar planetary systems; the CAS Research Group, which includes Philip Armitage (Stony Brook University), Cathie Clarke (Cambridge), Xuening Bai (Tsinghua University) as well as Doug Johnstone (Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre), will develop photoionization and thermal models covering an area stretching from the inside of the disk to its atmospheres and winds. Unpredictable, abrupt changes – sometimes described as turbulences – are the focus of research to be conducted by Klaus H. Götz. The Research Group will particularly investigate the question of whether extraordinary dynamics in both national and global politics are becoming increasingly frequent and what causes them. The group includes Keith Dowding (Canberra), Michael Howlett (Simon Fraser) and André Kaiser (Cologne). more