Bettina Bildhauer doesn’t look like someone who deals with monsters and blood all day long. She is wearing a turquoise-colored cardigan and light blue scarf with white dots, and her brown eyes have a friendly sparkle. She isn’t bothered in the least by watching horror movies or seeing blood, and she finds monsters exciting. As a child, though, Bildhauer played with Barbie dolls, not horror figures. It wasn’t until she began her university studies that she discovered her fondness for these topics, when she first encountered medieval texts and legends.

What makes us human? Newly appointed junior professor Katja Liebal is examining this far-reaching question in her new workplace: The 33-year-old Liebal has been conducting research at the Institute of Psychology and the “Languages of Emotion” cluster of excellence at Freie Universität Berlin since the summer semester, observing how great apes make contact with each other and convey information using gestures. Her findings: The boundary between humans and apes is more fluid than previously thought.

How have European conceptions of the cosmos and extraterrestrial life changed in step with the progress of space exploration? Geppert, who is to receive aid monies amounting to about 1.1 million euros over the next five years from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or DFG) as part of an Emmy Noether research group, will be able to establish a field of historical academic research that has thus far existed only in modest outline form in Europe.