New fellows in September

We are pleased to welcome a new cohort of fellows at the Kolleg in autumn. The first fellows in September are the historian and jurist Marie Seong-Hak Kim (St. Cloud State University), the social and economic historian Kaveh Yazdani (University of Connecticut) and the medieval historian Clara Harder (University of Cologne), who already completed a first stay at the Kolleg last year. We wish all fellows a good start in Münster and look forward to a stimulating collaboration.

The new fellows in profile:

Dr. Clara Harder is a research associate at the University of Cologne, where she received her PhD in Medieval and Modern History in 2013. Since 2020, the historian has been leading the DFG (German Research Foundation) funded project "Marginalien der Familie? Soziale und kulturelle Bedeutung von Illegitimität im hochmittelalterlichen Reich (900-1300)." Her research focuses on the political history of Latin Europe, papal and church history, and the history of family and illegitimacy in the Middle Ages. At the Kolleg, she will focus on clerics born out of wedlock and shed light on the connections between normative plurality and an increasingly uniform practice.

Prof. Dr. Marie Seong-Hak Kim is a specialist of sixteenth-century France and early modern and contemporary Korea. She is also known for her works on Japanese colonialism and comparative law. She was a fellow at several institutes in America, Asia and Europe, including the Collegium de Lyon, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. She is a professor at St. Cloud State University and a member of the Minnesota Bar. At the Kolleg, she will work on a comparative law project on the concept of customary law in Europe and East Asia, examining its function in harmonising old and new law.

Ass. Prof. Dr. Kaveh Yazdani has been teaching at the University of Connecticut since 2021. Previously, he worked at Bielefeld University and received fellowships at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the Warwick Institute of Advanced Study. He conducts research on capitalism in global perspective and on the social and economic history of India from the 17th to the 19th centuries. His Kolleg project examines, first, the role of law in the rise of the West from an Indian perspective. On the other hand, he asks about the "level of modernity" of Indian law in the 17th and 18th centuries.