New fellows in autumn / Welcome Day

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg is starting its winter semester and welcomes a new cohort of fellows. Six scholars from the fields of history, legal history and Islamic studies will conduct research on projects in the field of legal unity and pluralism, enriching the Kolleg with their different perspectives.

On 16 October, from 15.00, everybody interested will have the opportunity to get to know the Kolleg and its fellows better. On Welcome Day, the official opening of the Kolleg's semester, all new fellows will present their research projects in 15-minute talks. There will also be plenty of opportunity for specialist discussions as well as informal chats during the breaks. If you would like to attend, please register by e-mail to info.evir@uni-muenster.de.

The new fellows in profile:

Prof. Dr. Salvatore Marino was already a fellow at the Kolleg last winter semester. He has been teaching Roman Law and the Roman Legal Tradition as a lecturer at the Department of Humanities at the University of Naples Federico II since 2021. He received his PhD in law from the University of Cologne in 2009 and habilitated in 2018 after working at the Universities of Cologne, Göttingen and Münster. In his current research project, he is working on the ‘Dialectic of Privileges’. He assumes that privilege was understood as an extraordinary legal concept in the legal-plural society of Roman antiquity, but became an essential organising factor towards the Middle Ages.

Prof. Dr. Marco Cavarzere is a historian of the early modern period and a professor at the University Ca' Foscari of Venice. He received his PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2014 and then worked at the University of Frankfurt until 2020. Cavarzere's research project ‘Unity and Diversity in the Papal Courts of the Early Modern Period’ focuses on the judicial power exercised by the papacy during the early modern period in several European states and in their non-European territories through the tribunals of the Apostolic Nuncios.

PD Dr. Gundula Gahlen is a research associate at the Department of Global History at Paris Lodron University Salzburg and has been working in a sub-project of the DFG research group ‘Military Cultures of Violence’ since 2022. Gahlen habilitated at Freie Universität Berlin in 2021 with a thesis on mentally ill officers in Germany, for which she was awarded the first prize of the 2021 Prize for Military History and History of Military Technology. She is currently researching violent behaviour in the French and Austrian armies in the area of conflict between military criminal law, martial law and the customs of war during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815).

Dr. Cecilia Cristellon received her PhD from the European University Institute in 2005 and habilitated in early modern history in 2013. She has conducted research at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main, Konstanz, Pisa and Münster as well as at the German Historical Institute in Rome. In the summer semester 2024, she represented the Chair of Early Modern History in Frankfurt. She is a member of the POLY research project ‘Policentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities’. Her research focuses on ecclesiastical courts, book censorship, the social use of ecclesiastical spaces and interreligious and interconfessional relationships in the context of the Roman congregations.

PD Dr. Matthias Bähr received his doctorate in Modern History from the University of Münster in 2011. After a postdoc at the Institute for British-Irish Studies, University College Dublin, and at the Institute of Historical Research in London, he worked as a research assistant at the Technical University of Dresden from 2014 to 2022, where he was involved in the projects ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘Totes Kapital’. In 2019, he habilitated in Modern History at TU Dresden. He then took on interim professorships at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and TU Dresden.

Prof. Dr. Norbert Oberauer is a Professor of Islamic Studies with a focus on Islamic Law at the University of Münster. This winter semester, he is a guest at the Kolleg as a Münster Fellow. He completed his doctorate at the University of Freiburg with a thesis on the concept of religious obligation (taklÐf) and its theological, legal and social dimensions. He continued his academic career as a research assistant at the University of Bayreuth, where he habilitated with a study on Islamic religious foundations (waqf) in Zanzibar under colonial rule. His research focuses on Islamic contract law, Islamic legal hermeneutics, pious foundations (waqf) and the history of Islamic law.

We wish all new fellows a successful stay in Münster and look forward to fruitful collaboration.