Gotha Research Campus welcomes new fellows

On behalf of the City of Gotha, deputy mayor Knut Kreuch, Peter Leisner, full-time alderman for finance and education, came to welcome the researchers in attendance. He emphasised the important role of the fellows for the global networking of the city. Referring to the dialogue between the orientalist Job Ludolf and the Ethiopian scholar Abba Gorgoryos, he pointed to the long tradition of international academic exchange in Gotha.

Dr Kathrin Paasch, Director of the Gotha Research Library, invited the fellows to use the rich holdings of the research library to make new discoveries and to share the results of their stay with the scientific community in academic publications. Professor Iris Schröder, Director of the Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection, and Dr Benjamin Steiner, currently deputising for Professor Martin Mulsow as Director of the Gotha Research Centre, also welcomed the guests. Both thanked in particular the Ernst Abbe Foundation, which finances the Herzog Ernst Fellowship Programme. Thanks also went to the Dr Fritz Wiedemann Foundation, which is funding the new Luise Dorothea Scholarship for Court Culture Research, and the Dorothee Wilms Foundation, which supports a scholarship run jointly by the Gotha Research Centre, the Francke Foundations in Halle and the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel.

The scholarship holders' research topics are once again diverse this year: They include the collaboration between artists and astronomers in the 17th century and Protestant Hebraism, the processes of deforestation in northern Ethiopia that became visible in 19th and 20th century maps and court dress books from the early modern period. The scholars present their respective research projects in regular colloquia and discuss the latest finds in the Gotha collections.

The Herzog Ernst Scholarship Programme celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024. Over the past two decades, more than 400 scholarship holders have worked in the historical collections of the Gotha Research Library, the Emigrants' Letters Collection, the Gotha Perthes Collection and the holdings of the Friedenstein Foundation Gotha.