New Visiting Professorship for Religion and Politics
Historian Lucian Hölscher will be the first Hans Blumenberg Visiting Professor at the Cluster of Excellence
The Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” has newly set up the “Hans Blumenberg Visiting Professorship for Religion and Politics”. The first visiting professor is the renowned Bochum historian Prof. Dr. Lucian Hölscher, who will be at the research institution in the summer semester of 2016. In public lectures and in his research, he is going to address the 2017 anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and the culture of Protestant piety in Germany. The visiting professorship, named after the influential philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996), is to contribute to bringing innovative impulses from international research to Münster and consolidating the interdisciplinary compatibility at the Cluster of Excellence. Some 200 academics from more than 20 disciplines of the humanities and social sciences conduct research in the Cluster.
“Lucian Hölscher is one of the internationally leading representatives of social, cultural and religious history of the modern era, and has given major impetus to a new theory of history”, emphasises the speaker of the Cluster of Excellence, sociologist of religion Prof. Dr. Detlef Pollack. “His research findings are of high interest for our work. We expect important stimuli for our historical and social scientific research projects.” During the visiting professorship, Prof. Hölscher will continue to work on the second volume of his “Geschichte der protestantischen Frömmigkeit” (History of Protestant piety). The first volume, which covered the period from the Reformation to the beginning of the 20th century, is one of his most distinguished works.
Visiting professors from varying disciplines
In the semesters to come, other renowned researchers from varying disciplines will be appointed to the Hans Blumenberg Visiting Professorship, e.g. from sociology, ethnology and law. Guest professors will be selected at the suggestion of the Cluster of Excellence’s Principle Investigators for one semester each. Members of the Cluster of Excellence conduct secular and denominational research across cultures and eras, and related to history and the present age. Münster has thus become a place of interdisciplinary religious research that is prominent in size and diversity.
The lectures of the “Hans Blumenberg Visiting Professorship” will be held on four Tuesdays between 6.15 and 7.45 pm as of 12 April 2016 in lecture theatre F2 at Fürstenberghaus, Domplatz 20-22 in Münster – the location of the public lecture series of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics”. For this reason, the start of the lecture series in the summer semester will be postponed to 10 May 2016, its title being “Religious politics today – problem areas and perspectives in Germany”.
Prof. Dr. Lucian Hölscher is emeritus professor for modern history and the theory of history at Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB). He has been a member of the board of RUB’s Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Dynamics of Religion between Asia and Europe”, which has a historical approach, since 2008 and is head of its research field 3, “The formation of the notion of religion”. (vvm)