Max-Weber-Kolleg (Steinplatz 2) / Raum 513 (4. OG)
nach Vereinbarung
Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien
Steinplatz 2
99085 Erfurt
Universität Erfurt
Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien
Postfach 90 02 21
99105 Erfurt
Eleonor Marcussen has a PhD in South Asian History from the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University. Her dissertation was about civil society participation and governance of disaster aid in South Asia in the first half of the twentieth century.
Last year she joined as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cultural Sciences at Linnaeus University (Sweden), where she will continue her research on the socio-environmental impacts of infrastructural expansion in central India in the 1860s (2020-2022). Previously she was a junior fellow in the School of Environment and Ecology Studies at Nalanda University in New Delhi/Rajgir (2013), and at Heidelberg University she was a member of the research group ‘Cultures of Disaster’ (Cluster of Excellence, Asia and Europe in a Global Perspective, 2009-2012). More recently, she taught world history as a faculty in the Department of Philosophy and History at North South University, Dhaka (2017-2018). In 2019, she co-curated an exhibition on Scandinavian connections to colonial India in the 1860s through a collection of a British-Scandinavian railway contractor’s papers.
She also has an interest in digital humanities: as a PhD student she created online research guides for the League of Nations Archives at UNOG while an intern at the archives in Geneva (2012), more recently she participated in the Oxford University Summer School in Digital Humanities (2019) and is currently involved in the digitization of an archival collection at Linnaeus University Library (Sweden).
Her research interests include humanitarianism, historical disasters, governance and infrastructure.
Faith and Ideological Encounters in Pacifism: Pierre Ceresole and the Development of Transnational Peace Activism, 1909-1945
The present research project explores the role of religion and ideology in the thought and work of Pierre Ceresole (17/08/1879 - 23/10/1945) and the pacifist relief organisation Service Civil International (SCI) in the period 1909-1945. In the aftermath of World War I, Ceresole founded the SCI in response to the material destruction and human divisions created along national borders and political ideologies. His ideas about pacifism seems to initially have developed based on spiritual experiences, readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), William James (1842-1910) and Christian ethics, to later in the 1920s draw upon colonial resistance movements and conceptualizations of violence from the perspective of the colonized.
From the point of view of transnational history and social theory of action, the research is a contribution to our understanding of religious experience and the conceptualizations of violence and decolonization in the development of pacifism during the first half of the twentieth century. In doing so, the present research projects aims to further our understanding of spiritual, ideological and radical thoughts in pacifist ideas and activism in the first half of the century.
Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien
Universität Erfurt
Postfach 90 02 21
99105 Erfurt
Universität Erfurt (Campus)
Nordhäuser Str. 63
99089 Erfurt