About

Professor Gyburg Uhlmann is the Founding Chair of the Department of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the Technical University of Nuremberg (UTN) and Professor of Classics (Greek Philology). She studied Classics and Archaeology at the Universities of Marburg and Heidelberg, received her PhD summa cum laude in 2001 on the relationship between mathematics and philosophy in Platonism, and completed her Habilitation in 2003 on ancient Platonic Commentaries and educational concepts in late antiquity. After research stays at Harvard University and professorship replacements in Heidelberg and Münster, she served from 2007 to 2023 as Professor of Greek Philology at Freie Universität Berlin, where she directed the Center for Aristotelian Studies and was Speaker of the Collaborative Research Center “Episteme in Motion: Knowledge Transfer from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period.”
Her main research areas include ancient philosophy—particularly Platonism and Aristotelianism—, the history of knowledge and education, and rhetoric and political communication. She examines historical theories and practices of knowledge and persuasion in relation to modern questions of rationality, public discourse, and digital communication. Her work combines the history of philosophy and rhetoric with digital humanities and contemporary studies of human and artificial intelligence.

Publications

Selected publications include:

• “Rhetorik und Wahrheit. Ein prekäres Verhältnis von Sokrates bis Trump” (“Rhetoric and Truth: A Precarious Relationship from Socrates to Trump”, Metzler, 2019),
• “Stil und Elliptik: Die Rolle der Leser” (“Style and Ellipsis: The Role of the Reader”), in Stil und Rhetorik (“Style and Rhetoric”, ed. E. Geulen, M. Möller, 2022),
• “Scheitern in den Sokratischen Dialogen Platons” (“Failure in Plato’s Socratic Dialogues”), Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie 2/2023
• “Programmatische Anfangssätze in Aristotelischen Pragmatien” (“Programmatic Opening Sentences in Aristotelian Pragmateiai”), in Aristoteles-Kommentare und ihre Überlieferung (“Aristotle Commentaries and Their Transmission”, De Gruyter, 2024),
• “Dasselbe Odyssee-Zitat in Platons Dialogen Laches und Charmides” (“The Same Odyssey Quote in Plato’s Laches and Charmides”), in Logbuch Wissensgeschichte (“Logbook of Knowledge History”, Harrassowitz, 2024).

Recent and forthcoming works include:

• “The Rhetorical Strategies of @realDonaldTrump and the Refusal of Discursive Argumentation”, in The Great Disruptor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025),
• “The Even Sheen of AI: Kitsch, LLMs, and Homogeneity” (arXiv 2025, under review in Ethics and Information Technology),

as well as forthcoming essays:

• “Mistakes, Akrasia, Reason – A Philosophical Comment on Robert Noggle’s Manipulation,” and
• “On Symbolic Mathematics, Stoic Language Theory and How to Define Losers”, in Losers of the Scientific Revolution (eds. D. Garber, D. Jalobeanu).

She also writes regularly among others for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Forschung & Lehre and is actively committed to science communication and numerous collaborations with schools and teacher training programs.

In academic and university management, Professor Uhlmann has held numerous roles. As Founding Chair at UTN, she is responsible for establishing the humanities and social sciences within a technical university, developing interdisciplinary degree programs, and creating interfaces between the humanities, social sciences, and engineering. She is a member of the Wissenschaftliche Kommission Niedersachsen (Scientific Commission of Lower Saxony), the Excellence Council of the University of Hamburg, and serves on national and international academic policy committees.