Hermann Paul Preis 2025: the award ceremony

On May 26, 2025, the Hermann Paul School of Linguistics Basel-Freiburg awarded the “Hermann Paul Preis” to Dr. Robert Reinecke for his outstanding doctoral thesis on “Die interaktive Hervorbringung von Kreativität“.

The award ceremony took place in the Great Hall of the English Department in Basel. The Chairwoman of the Board of Directors in Basel, Lorenza Mondada, hosted the ceremony. In her introduction, she emphasized the importance and success of our graduate school in promoting young scientists in a challenging academic environment.

Claudio Scarvaglieri (Lausanne) gave the keynote speech on “Agency. Zu Verlust und Wiedergewinnung sprachlicher Handlungsfähigkeit”. In his talk, he shared insights from his current research with numerous examples from psychotherapeutic practice. From there, he drew parallels to his own career steps and decisions and the attainment of self-efficacy in his own professional life through a openness to change, networking, and, last but not least, perseverance.

Then it was time to honour the award winner. In his laudatory speech, Simon Pröll (Freiburg) outlined how the award jury arrived at its decision. Particular praise was given to the independence and risk-taking nature of the winning project, as well as the clarity of its structure and argumentation and the author’s scientifically profound and methodologically sound approach. It was also emphasized that the results are relevant to practice and of interest to a wider audience.

Finally, the award winner, Robert Reinecke, gave a brief overview of his dissertation. Using data examples from his corpus of work sessions in advertising agencies, he was able to present a process model of the interactional production of creative achievements and show that this output is based on the interplay of different communicative modalities.

The event was accompanied by music from the jazz duo Chris & Yves (trombone and piano).

After these inspiring presentations, the guests were able to round off the evening with an aperitif under the old trees in the courtyard.