New research projects expand the Cluster of Excellence’s spectrum of themes

The Cluster of Excellence has expanded its research programme with seven new projects from the disciplines of history, Slavic studies, Protestant theology, Coptic studies, and Arabic studies. The new projects range from religion in the ancient Mediterranean to secularism in France in the 20th century. The seven University of Münster professors took part in an ideas contest organized by the Cluster of Excellence to establish new research projects on “Religion and Politics”.

The individual projects and researchers

• The Protestant theologian Prof. Dr. Christophe Nihan deals with the emergence and transformations of concepts of purity in the Judaism of the ancient Mediterranean during the Persian and Hellenistic periods.
• Titled Cosmocracy and Pantocracy in Early Christianity (KoPaC), the project of Prof. Dr. Eve-Marie Becker explores the roots, functions, and effects of early Christian rulership images.
• The Coptic scholar Prof. Dr. Gesa Schenke’s project, Abraham and Daily Life, deals with active and transmitted piety in the Coptic tradition of the Testament of Abraham through original codices of the 4th and 10th centuries.
• The Arabic scholar Prof. Dr. Syrinx von Hees investigates the political dimensions of a controversial literary-religious discourse concerning transformations of the Burda in the 13th-15th century.
• The project of the historian Prof. Dr. Ricarda Vulpius is concerned with the “newly baptized” in the Tsarist empire of the 18th and early 19th century.
• The Slavic scholar Prof. Dr. Irina Wutsdorff deals with the a-mimetics of icons in Russian art and literature in the 19th and 20th century.
• Finally, the historian Prof. Dr. Silke Mende’s project, Secularism as a (post-)colonial challenge?, addresses religion and republicanism in Marseille from 1946 to 1989.

New postdoc projects

Three postdocs will also begin new research projects at the Cluster of Excellence in the spring of 2022:

• Dr. Roii Ball: Transregional Farming Families, Religious Revivalism, and Agrarian Colonization in Germany’s Imperial Frontiers, 1860s-1920s
• Dr. Jelena Radovanović: Law in Religious Spaces: Ottoman Religious Endowments (waqf) in Post-Ottoman Southeast Europe
• Dr. Nandagopal R. Menon: Polemics, Apologetics and Conversion: A Diachronic Study of Religious Change

(apo/sca)