Gotha Research Centre awards Luise Dorothea Scholarship for Court Culture Research

The internationally oriented scholarship is open to all historically orientated disciplines. It supports projects that focus on research into early modern court culture based on the Gotha collections. A clearly substantiated reference to the local collections is therefore essential, but the research topic itself does not have to be limited exclusively to Gotha, but can, for example, combine research into the Gotha court with that of other courts of the period from around 1650 to 1850 through a comparative or interrelationship-historical approach.

The namesake of the scholarship, Duchess Luise Dorothea of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg (1710–1767), was regarded by her contemporaries as one of the most educated princesses of her time, who was particularly committed to promoting the French Enlightenment and maintained an extensive network of correspondence, including with Rousseau and Voltaire and the Saxon Count Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel, the "patron of the Enlightenment" and supporter of Christian Wolff. It is therefore exemplary of modern research into early modern court culture with the explicit inclusion of cultural studies and gender history research approaches.

The Gotha location, with the universally orientated collections of the Friedenstein Foundation Gotha, the Gotha Research Library and the holdings of the Thuringian State Archives – Gotha State Archives, is one of the outstanding collection and research locations for the cultural history of the early modern period and the modern era. During their stay on site, the scholarship holders are linked to the Gotha Research Centre. In recent years, the FZG has provided impetus for research into Gotha's court culture, including with the conferences on the "Palace as Lecture Hall" in 2017 and on the 300th birthday of the Franco-German cultural mediator Friedrich Melchior Grimm in September 2023, as well as with two summer schools on "Africans at European courts in the early modern period" (2022) and "Gotha's Africa. Courtly perceptions of the continent in the early modern period' (2025). The Luise Dorothea Scholarship from the Fritz Wiedemann Foundation and accompanying project proposals are intended to continue and intensify this research over the next few years.

The scholarship amounts to 2,000 euros per month. This may be supplemented by a family allowance of 400 euros per month and a one-off travel allowance of 500 euros. Residency is compulsory for the entire scholarship period.

Application:
Applications for the scholarship can be submitted in German and English by email to forschungszentrum.gotha@uni-erfurt.de by 31 July 2026, quoting the keyword “Luise-Dorothea-Stipendium für Hofkulturforschung der Fritz-Wiedemann-Stiftung”. Notification of the award of the scholarship will be made by 17 August 2026.

Further information, including the documents required for the application, can be found on the Gotha Research Centre website.