Research projects

A B C E F G H I J K M N P R S T V W

A Change of Mind. West-Eastern Church Experiences

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jörg Seiler Duration
05/2015 - 12/2016 Funding
Bonifatiuswerk:
6 000 €

Jörg Seiler: Ever since they moved to the East as a result of unification, people have been talking about a completely new experience of church and community and the relationship of these East German communities to the public. These experiences are to be examined exemplarily and empirically in the form of targeted interviews. The interviews will be presented in excerpts on listening stations (Katholikentag in Leipzig) and then scientifically evaluated.

Alms Collectors between Charity, Commerce and Denominationalisation

Project management
Prof. Dr. Vasilios N. Makrides Duration
06/2019 - 05/2020 Funding
Gerda Henkel Stiftung:
30 000 €

Vasilios N. Makrides: The immigration of Eastern Orthodox alms collectors from the Ottoman Empire into the Old Empire is the focus of the project. It pursues interwoven questions of migration, knowledge and denominational history. In order to clarify these questions, archives from different territories of the empire will be compared and insights into the history of other types of migrants (traders and students), but also of other charitable groups active in the same field, will be drawn upon.

Between Experience and Memory: Educational Paths of Christian Citizens of the GDR from Socialist Society to the Present Day

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jörg Seiler Duration
01/2019 - 09/2025

Subproject in the research network "Dictatorship Experience and Transformation". The research project is based on the observation that the disadvantages of young Christians in the GDR are mostly remembered in close connection with socialist educational institutions. Therefore, the historical study focuses on narratives, practices and structures of inequalities in the education system and explores the educational paths of Christian citizens of the GDR.

Black and Deaf Western Missionaries and Deaf Education in Ghana and Nigeria: The Story of Berta and Andrew Foster - A Case Study in Global History

Project management
PD Dr. Anja Werner Duration
07/2022 - 06/2025 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
356 650 €

Anja Werner: I examine deaf missionaries Andrew and Berta Foster, who starting in 1957 founded more than 30 schools and churches for the deaf in thirteen African countries.

Catholic Women Writers as Products and Producers of "Catholic Femininity"?

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jörg Seiler Duration
09/2016 - 09/2023 Funding
Several donors
300 000 €

Jörg Seiler: The anti-modernist phase of Catholicism was characterized by normative Catholic ascriptions of femininity, which mostly obscured the pluralization dynamics of these decades. Persistence, change and (un)simultaneous emancipative ideas about a Catholic gender order should therefore be reconstructed in church history on the basis of biographical sources and literary works of Catholic women writers. As representatives of a liberal profession, they represented an unbound heterogeneous…

CoMOR: "Configurations of European Fairs. Merchants, Objects, Routes (1350-1600)"

Project management
Prof. Dr. Susanne Rau Duration
04/2020 - 10/2023 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
600 000 €

Susanne Rau: "CoMOR" (Configurations of European Fairs. Merchants, Objects, Routes) will examine the history of European fairs from the perspective of increasing market integration in the period from around 1320 (end of the Champagne fairs) to 1630 (decline of the Besançon fairs).

Contested Democracy. Gender, race and sex in US American history

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Martschukat Duration
01/2021 - 12/2024 Funding
Gerda Henkel Stiftung:
161 000 €

The project investigates struggles for hegemony and democracy along the lines of gender, race and sex in the form of a conflict history of the USA in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.

Courtly Cultural Areas in Central Germany

Project management
Dr. Kathrin Paasch Duration
02/2014 - 09/2017 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
147 000 €

Kathrin Paasch: Occasional writings belong to a literary genre that is considered to be one of the most productive sources of information on personalities in the early modern period. The aim of the project is to research a source inventory of 7,455 personal occasional writings of the court from the first appearance of humanism until the end of the 18th century.

Eastern Christians and the Republic of Letters between the 16th and 18th centuries

Project management
Prof. Dr. Vasilios N. Makrides Duration
01/2019 - 12/2021 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
45 000 €

Vasilios N. Makrides: The Republic of Letters, a wide network of intellectuals, also has an Eastern side with numerous actors communicating in Greek, Latin, Arabic or Slavic languages (especially on religious issues). Despite the existence of extensive sources, this topic has rarely been studied interdisciplinary and from an "entangled history" perspective. In order to enable a more complete cartography of this East-West exchange (16th-18th century), this project will bring together scholars of…

Educational Landscape and Knowledge Culture

Project management
Several Duration
07/2014 - 05/2017 Funding
Several donors
290 000 €

Gotha was one of the most important centres of innovation in early modern European educational history. In the project, collections-based research will be carried out using the educational history sources collected in the 17th and early 18th centuries with the aim of making the hitherto almost unknown holdings accessible to science and the public and demonstrating their potential for international research in educational history.

Expansion of the Gotha Research Library into a Research and Study Centre for the Cultural History of Protestantism in the Early Modern Period

Project management
Dr. Kathrin Paasch Duration
03/2015 - 02/2018 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
534 000 €

The Gotha Research Library preserves an outstanding collection of sources on the cultural history of Protestantism in the early modern period. This is the basis of the six-year infrastructure project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), in which the library combines coordinated activities for the cataloguing and preservation of this important and hitherto largely unexplored material with the further development of its digital services and transfers the results of its work to science…

Fighting the monstrous ‘many-headed multitude’

Duration
09/2016 - 08/2017 :
1 416 000 €

Cesare Cuttica: A historiographical consensus simply accepts that in the early modern period democracy was reputed to be the worst form of government. However, this scholarly trend leaves a few major questions unanswered: why was this so? How was criticism of democracy articulated? In what ways did different authors and genres depict popular government? Which political concerns and social prejudices informed this anti-democratic paradigm? What is the legacy of such a mindset? In order to address…

Forgotten Bauhaus Women. Fates of life in the 1930s and 1940s

Project management
Prof. Dr. Dr. Patrick Rössler Duration
10/2021 - 01/2022

Patrick Rössler: The exhibition project "Forgotten Bauhaus Women" by the University of Erfurt and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar is dedicated to researching these fates, of which more than thirty will be presented at the Bauhaus Museum Weimar from October 2021.

G. W. Leibniz and Eastern Europe

Project management
Prof. Dr. Gábor Gángó Duration
09/2019 - 08/2017

Despite its high relevance for the formation of the early modern consciousness of Europe, the research topic "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Eastern Europe" proves to be terra incognita in the otherwise already widely explored life and work of the German polymath and calls for fundamental critical discussion. In order to contribute to the revival of an early work that has so far only been marginally treated, I will, during my stay at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, prepare a manuscript for a monograph on…

Globalisation and Local Knowledge

Project management
Prof. Dr. Susanne Rau Duration
09/2012 - 02/2016 Funding
Several donors
300 000 €

The research project is to be understood as a pilot project, which is intended to comprehensively demonstrate the research potential of the cartographic-geographical "The Gotha Perthes Collection" acquired by the Free State of Thuringia in 2003 for the first time. In addition, it is intended to contribute to the further development of the collection and to establish a virtual map laboratory, the "GlobMapLaboratory".

Hidden Histories: Frauen in ländlichen Entwicklungsprogrammen in Indien, c. 1920–1966

Project management
Dr. Maria Framke Duration
08/2021 - 07/2024 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
335 000 €

The project is dedicated to contributions of Indian women to rural development programmes from about 1920 to 1966, following the call to include gender as a category of analysis in the history of development. The aim of the project is to examine the role of women in the design and implementation of governmental and non-governmental rural development projects in India in the key areas of health, education and livelihoods, and in this way to re-capture the processes of development and citizenship.…

Institutionalising the law of nature and nations: The universities of Kiel, Greifswald and Rostock 1648–1806

Project management
Dr. Mikkel Munthe Jensen Duration
07/2022 - 06/2026 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
350 000 €

The project is about the history of the teaching of natural law at the three north German universities in Kiel, Greifswald and Rostock during the period 1648–1806. It is concerned with why, how and to what extent this academic discipline developed in three different political settings along the Baltic coast. The project is based on the general presumption that natural law was of great significance for the period’s intellectual development and state building endeavours. The general aim of the…

Jacopo Stradas Magnum ac Novum Opus

Project management
Prof. Dr. Martin Mulsow Duration
11/2015 - 05/2022 Funding
Several donors
1 263 000 €

Jacopo Strada (ca. 1515-1588), antiquarian, architect and antique dealer, created a corpus of 30 volumes, the Magnum ac Novum Opus, for his patron Johann Jakob Fugger in the mid-16th century. The project is intended to bring together the entire corpus for the first time, analyse it in its historical and artistic context, research its sources and work out its significance for the history of numismatics and antiquarian research in the 16th century.

Kolleg-Research Group "Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective" (FOR 1013)

Project management
Several Duration
01/2013 - 09/2018 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
8 470 000 €

Jörg Rüpke: The research group investigates cases of individualization within the medium of religion and their consequences for religious change, that is, in terms of their religious historical dynamics.

Kulturtechniken des Sammelns (Cooperation project Cultural Techniques of Collecting)

Project management
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Struck Duration
01/2023 - 12/2025 Funding
Several donors
335 000 €

The project serves to establish a sustainable research infrastructure that connects the research group "Kulturtechniken des Sammelns" (Cultural Techniques of Collecting) at the University of Erfurt and other researchers at the Universities of Weimar and Jena with the various collection institutions in Gotha.

M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies "Metamorphoses of the Political" (ICAS-MP)

Project management
Several Duration
08/2015 - 06/2024

Martin Fuchs: ICAS-MP combines the benefits of an open, interdisciplinary forum for intellectual exchange with the advantages of a cutting-edge research centre. The centre focuses on key political processes that have emerged in parallel in many parts of the world during the twentieth century through to the present day, processes that are entangled yet heterogeneous.

Nutrition, Health and Modern Society: Germany and the United States

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Martschukat Duration
10/2015 - 10/2018 Funding
VolkswagenStiftung:
1 000 000 €

The research project aims to work out the significance of nutrition and health for the order of modern societies from the 19th century to the present. The empirical focus is on the USA and Germany, so that regional differences as well as the dynamics of interdependence in globalizing constellations become apparent.

Paths and Works of Michael Kosmeli (1773-1844). A forgotten key figure in the trans-Ottoman corridor and context

Project management
Dr. Dirk Sangmeister Duration
03/2021 - 02/2024 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
300 000 €

The versatile writer, polyglot translator and virtuoso Jew's harp player Kosmeli, who travelled restlessly for decades in the space between Germany and Eastern Europe on the one hand and the Ottoman Empire together with Persia on the other, was acquainted with prominent contemporaries such as Adelbert von Chamisso, Jean Paul and the Orientalist Joseph (von) Hammer(-Purgstall), also told Goethe "much about Constantinople and the Orient" in Jena in 1809, but is today a completely forgotten figure.…

Politics of Plunder

Duration
09/2016 - 08/2017 :
1 415 998 €

Kornelia Kończal: Around the end of the Second World War two processes dramatically changed the socio-economic landscape of East Central Europe: the expulsion of up to twelve million Germans and the establishment of a new social order inspired by the Soviet model. This project is an inquiry into the interconnectedness between these apparently distinct histories.

Property and habit. On the political anthropology of ownership in Western modernity

Project management
Several Duration
01/2021 - 12/2024

Subproject in the SFB TRR294 "Structural Change of Property". The project is dedicated to the political anthropology of ownership between the eighteenth and early twentieth century. It investigates an assumption that is widespread in the humanities: that ownership structures bring about the formation of specific habits.

Property in one’s own body and in the bodies of others in the United States between the eighteenth and twentieth century

Project management
Several Duration
01/2021 - 12/2024

Subproject in the SFB TRR294 "Structural Change of Property". The subproject explores the ownership of others’ bodies based on the history of slavery in the USA.

Reaching for Atlantis

Project management
Dr. Bernhard Schirg Duration
03/2018 - 02/2023 Funding
VolkswagenStiftung:
1 000 000 €

In his project, the historian wants to investigate the history of objects that were the subject of a fundamental reinterpretation of material culture at the time of the Swedish Empire (1650-1720).

Reception of the Works of Nicholas of Cusa in the Manuscripts from the Erfurt Charterhouse at the End of the 15th Century

Duration
09/2016 - 08/2017 :
1 416 000 €

Mikhail Khorkov: My project attempts to clarify the extraordinary reception of the Works of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) in the manuscripts from the Erfurt Charterhouse at the end of the 15th century. The main object of study in my project is collected manuscript Weimar, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Q 51 (previously: Erfurt, Kartause Salvatorberg, D 51). It originated in the Erfurt Charterhouse at the end of 15th century, perhaps under the influence of mystical theology of the famous Erfurt…

Religion and Politics in Protestant Sermons of the 16th and 17th Century in the Thuringian-Saxon Region

Project management
Dr. Kathrin Paasch Duration
10/2008 - 03/2015 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
101 000 €

Due to its denominational anchoring, the Gotha Research Library has a reference collection for the history of Central German Protestantism in the 16th and 17th centuries. An extremely extensive collection of sermons is part of this outstanding tradition. The aim of the project is to make the collection of political sermons accessible to the interested public online.

Religious individualisation and nationalism in modern Europe through the lens of alternative spirituality and Western esotericism (1823–1939)

Duration
09/2016 - 08/2017 :
1 416 000 €

Marco Pasi: My project at the MWK focuses on the complex interplay between religious individualisation, nationalism, and alternative spirituality in modern Europe. I intend to carry out my research by focusing on four case studies, based on four exemplary figures of European history: the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), the Italian political activist Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935).

Research Centre for Contemporary Church History

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jörg Seiler Duration
01/1970

Jörg Seiler: The Research Centre for Contemporary Church History investigates the specific form of Catholicism in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ)/ German Democratic Republic (DDR). It deals with the "double diaspora situation" of Central and East German Catholics.

Research Centre for Early-Modern Natural Law

Project management
Prof. Dr. Knud Haakonssen Duration
07/2016 Funding
:
8 000 €

Knud Haakonssen: The research centre was created in 2016 and is from 2019 a joint facility of the Max Weber Centre and the Gotha Research Centre. Its purpose is to foster new work and coordinate current scholarship on natural law in the early-modern period, which we take to stretch from the Reformation to the early nineteenth century. Within this framework the focus is on the flowering of natural law in the period after Hugo Grotius and especially the shaping of the subject as an academic…

Research Group "Voluntariness"

Project management
Several Duration
10/2020 - 03/2027 Funding
Several donors
4 120 551 €

Jürgen Martschukat, Christiane Kuller, Sabine Schmolinsky, Iris Schröder: In this project, the researchers will examine voluntariness as a driving force of human practices in the past and present. The central question is how Western pre-modern and modern, but also non-European societies and subjects are governed through the principle of voluntariness. This includes, for example, religiously motivated voluntariness in medieval martyrdom as well as voluntary "participation" in dictatorships. The…

Stategies of Collecting an Displaying China in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Gotha's Chinese Cabinet

Project management
Dr. Emily Teo Duration
05/2021 - 04/2024 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
300 000 €

My research project brings renewed attention to a significant Chinese collection in early-nineteenth-century Germany, the Chinese Cabinet in Gotha, established by Duke Emil August (1772–1822) of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg from 1804 to 1810. Consisting of over 2000 objects, the Cabinet was a great sensation during the first decades of the nineteenth-century and was described as the most important Chinese collection in continental Europe. However, following the establishment of national museums across…

The Eating Self

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Martschukat Duration
10/2012 - 04/2017 Funding
Fritz Thyssen Stiftung:
24 000 €

Obesity is currently described as a problem that is assuming epidemic proportions in modern societies, particularly in the USA. Based on this observation, the present project aims to write a history of eating, being obese, health and its regulation in the USA since the middle of the 19th century.

The Historical Sources of the Reformation and Historiography of the Early 18th Century at Friedenstein Castle Gotha

Project management
Dr. Kathrin Paasch Duration
05/2014 - 04/2017 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
270 000 €

The Gotha Research Library preserves a top-class collection on the cultural history of Protestantism in the early modern period, which was compiled by the Dukes of Saxony-Gotha. An essential component of this unique handwritten tradition, which reaches far beyond the Central German cultural area, is the estate of the theologian and church historian Ernst Salomon Cyprian (1673-1745), which is to be catalogued in the project.

The Mission of the English Philadelphians in Germany, Building Networks and the Spoken Transmission of their Ideology

Project management
Dr. Lucinda Martin Duration
07/2014 - 07/2017 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
261 998 €

In the Gotha Research Library, there is a geographically arranged 'Catalogus amicorum in Germania', which served the Philadelphians as a starting point for their German mission, together with a volume of letters from this group. In addition, there are important holdings in other archives which have also received little attention from scientists. Based on these sources, the project will reconstruct the early network of the Philadelphians between England and Germany as well as the social and…

The birth of rights universalism from reformed international law. The natural law of Heinrich and Samuel Cocceji and its controversial reception in the European Enlightenment

Project management
Dr. Stefanie Ertz Duration
02/2024 - 01/2027 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
317 000 €

The aim of the project, which at the same time further strengthens the focus on natural law at the Gotha Research Centre, is to explore the natural law teachings of Heinrich Cocceji (1644–1719) and his son and editor Samuel Cocceji (1679–1755). In a monograph, Cocceji's natural law, which centres on a theocratic-voluntarist concept of inalienable liberties, will be presented in its political and ideological-historical contexts and in its controversial reception in the European Enlightenment. …

Trust and Mistrust in Early Eighteenth Century International Political Thought, 1713–1763

Duration
09/2016 - 08/2017 :
1 416 000 €

Peter Schröder: My project builds on my previous work Trust in Early Modern International Political Thought, 1598–1713 (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in spring 2017) to explore the role of trust and mistrust between European states in the emergence of international political thought through the first half of the 18th century, from the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 to the Peace of Paris in 1763.

Voluntariness and Decolonization. The Regulation of Labor in (Post-)Colonial Ghana

Project management
Prof. Dr. Iris Schröder Duration
10/2020 - 09/2023

Subproject in the research group "Voluntariness". This subproject focuses on voluntariness during an era of decolonization and thus on a political principle of (post-)colonial governance. Drawing on the case of the British Gold Coast/Ghana, we explore how voluntary action shaped the political and social order during the transition from late colonial “indirect rule” to independence, while examining how voluntariness became a political and social norm and resource. Our key focus is on the…

Voluntariness as Political Practice. The Emerging United States and American Citizenship

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Martschukat Duration
10/2020 - 09/2023

Subproject in the research group "Voluntariness". The emerging United States is widely regarded as the cradle of liberalism. This “new form of political life,” to quote philosopher Anthony Appiah, took off in the American republic and spawned the “American citizen” as the ideal of the liberal subject. This subproject examines the significance of voluntariness in this process and shows how liberty took on concrete form in the new republic, pointing up the voluntary forms of thinking and acting…

Western Traditionalism/Perennialism and its Influence on Orthodox Christianity

Project management
Prof. Dr. Vasilios N. Makrides Duration
05/2017 - 04/2020 Funding
Several donors
211 400 €

Vasilios N. Makrides: The research project aims to undertake a comparative analysis of the reflection on the position of Orthodox Christianity in modernity and with regard to religious pluralism, which is called "Orthodox Perennialism". The latter represents an orthodox reception of certain Western esoteric approaches to an "eternal philosophy" ("philosophia perennis") in various religions and is an attempt to rethink and articulate the spiritual and religious contours of the Orthodox presence…

What is Western about the West?

Project management
Prof. Dr. Holt Meyer Duration
02/2018 - 01/2021 Funding
Several donors
420 000 €

The project focuses on spatio-temporal practices regarding the production and representation of westernness. With the question of what is Western about the West, it takes up a highly political and socially relevant question.

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