Accessing Cultures

The emerging field “Accessing Cultures” bundles the exceptional disciplinary breadth of the University’s research, teaching and transfer activities which explore diverse cultures and cultural areas from antiquity to the present day. As the administrator and local partner of a number of museums and collections, the University of Münster has access to prominent cultural institutions which collect and investigate cultural artefacts and make them available to the general public. Special attention is devoted to developing and testing new approaches to studying cultures and the conditions of access to cultural assets in the digital age.

The research projects in the emerging field “Accessing Cultures” make temporally or spatially distant cultures just as accessible to us as cultures of contemporary and everyday life. They shed light on the significance and conditions of access to cultural assets and tie research perspectives from the fields of philology, archaeology, history, the study of historical theologies, art history and musicology to those of cultural and social anthropology, philosophy and law. In addition to conducting international field research in Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Armenia, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Mali, Uganda, India and South and North America, the numerous project partnerships in this emerging field focus on investigating ordinary and extra-ordinary cultural phenomena within and outside Europe, producing digital editions and offering museum research and Digital Humanities perspectives.