New entries in “Religion and Urbanity online” (upload 2/2024)
The peer-reviewed, open access database of the “Religion and Urbanity” research...
Author: urbrel
Congratulations to Simone Wagner on winning the Schöpflin prize
Simone Wagner has won the Johann Daniel Schöpflin Prize for her dissertation “Gender and Urbanity. The authority of abbesses and provosts in south-western collegiate churches”. In her dissertation she has analysed how the authority of abbesses and provosts in collegiate churches was constructed and to what extent gender and urbanity influenced their authority…
Running in the city forest: 87th Steiger (spring) run
Tom Hamilton, Associate Professor in Early Modern European History at Durham University, UK and fellow of the Max Weber Centre in summer 2024, took part in the 87th Steiger (spring) run in Erfurt. They met on 21 April 2024 in Erfurt, Am Reitplatz. The race comprises several parts and always takes place in spring…
Moving Stairways to Heaven: How Singapore’s Megachurches Navigate Urban Infrastructures
How do megachurches, with several thousand worshippers per week, find space in a densely populated city-state like Singapore, characterized by limited space? The urban landscape and use of city space are tightly regulated by the government. Fast-growing neo-Pentecostal megachurches, needing large auditoriums for their worship services, often fail to gain permission from the state to build churches that cater to 5,000 or more worshippers…
Congratulations to Christopher Degelmann on receiving the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz prize 2024!
Our former fellow Christopher Degelmann has been awarded with the prestigious Heinz Meier-Leibnitz prize by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The Meier-Leibnitz prize is the most important award presented by the DFG to early career researchers…
Researching Fictional Entanglements of Religion and a Dystopian Urban Imagination
A press photograph portrays a woman wearing an old-fashioned white bonnet and a red mantle, her mouth covered by a cloth of the same colour. Her clothing is a reference to a widespread dystopian narrative initiated by Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 that has become a global narrative thanks to numerous media adaptations, and particularly the successful Hulu TV series released from 2017 onwards…
Quellenworkshop zur Geschichte des Todes in der Frühen Neuzeit
KFG Fellow Edmund Kizik (Universität Gdansk) und Kerngruppenmitglied Martin Christ führen am 03. Juli 2024 einen Workshop zu frühneuzeitlichen Quellen über die Bedeutung und den Umgang mit den Toten durch.
Conference Announcement: Making Boundaries 2025
The KFG « Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations » is announcing its next annual conference, which will take place in Erfurt from the 4th to 6th June 2025. The topic is Making Boundaries – Performing Religion and Urbanity.
“Garten und Religion?!” – Sonderbeitrag zum Thema Paradiesgarten
Masterstudierende der Uni Erfurt erarbeiteten gemeinsam mit Sara Keller einen Bereich in der Sonderausstellung zu “Garten und Religion?!”, die derzeit im Erfurter Gartenbaumuseum zu sehen ist. Im Seminar „Der Paradiesgarten als Idealraum“ setzten sich die Studierenden mit religiösen und philosophischen Konzepten auseinander, die von der Antike bis in die Frühe Neuzeit die Gestaltung persischer und indischer Gärten beeinflussten. Die sogenannten Charbagh (oder Chaharbagh) Gärten zeichnen sich durch eine geometrische Anordnung von Strukturen wie Einfriedungen, Wasserkanälen, Pavillons und Wegen aus, weisen aber auch eine üppige Flora auf.
Some highlights from our blog
Since 2018 we have been publishing articles, reviews, reports and personal reflections on a variety of topics. In most cases they are tied in one way or an other to one of our research areas: South Asia, especially India and Pakistan, the Mediterranean from Antiquity until today, and Europe, especially in the Medieval and Early Modern period. We have picked some of our favourite entried by fellows and core group members of the Religion and Urbanity group in Erfurt.
City of Words
Review by Supriya Chaudhuri. In February last year I was in Hampi, Karnataka, once the sacral core of the city of Vijayanagara, capital of India’s last great Hindu empire. Sitting in the shadow of the Virupaksha temple, I read Salman Rushdie’s fifteenth novel, Victory City, a magical, intricate history of the foundation and destruction of the city of Vijayanagara, or Bisnaga, as it was called by the Portuguese traveller Domingo Paes.
Archäologie aus der Ferne: Religion und Urbanität im spätantiken Nordsyrien
von Verena Fugger. Wenn es um das Thema „Archäologie in Syrien“ geht, werden den meisten LeserInnen dieses Blog-Beitrags vermutlich noch die durch zahlreiche Medienkanäle verbreiteten Bilder der Sprengung des Beltempels in Palmyra durch Gruppen der Terrormiliz Islamischer Staat am 31. August 2015 lebendig in Erinnerung sein. Abgesehen von der unfassbaren humanitären Katastrophe, die dieser Krieg über die Bevölkerung brachte, gehörten die Zerstörung und Plünderung archäologischer Fundstätten, historischer Altstädte wie jener von Aleppo und musealer Exponate zu den größten Gräueltaten des Terrorregimes. Unwiederbringlich verloren sind zahllose Kulturgüter, die – wenn sie nicht durch direkte Kriegshandlungen oder Vandalismus zerstört worden sind – ihren Weg aus den örtlichen Museen in den illegalen Kunsthandel und von dort mittlerweile auch nach Deutschland gefunden haben.
Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims (Routledge, 2023)
The new book by Epsita Halder, former fellow of the ‘Religion and Urbanity’ group, is titled ‘Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims’. It was published in 2023 and studies the emergence and formation of a viable Muslim identity in Bengal over the late-19th century through the 1940s. Beginning with an explanation of significance of the martyrdom of Hazrat Muhammad’s grandson Husayn in the battle of Karbala (680 CE) for the Muslims, this book explores how this particular historical episode was recurrently reclaimed and reinterpreted by the Bangla-speaking ulama and Muslim literati to define what it meant to be Muslim in colonial Bengal.
Conference report: Urban Co-Temporality
The report by Zahra Naghshband (University of Erfurt) on the 2024 international conference “Urban Co-Temporality: Historical and Theoretical approaches”, organised by the “Religion and Urbanity” research group and the Erfurter RaumZeit Forschung, has now been published on H-Soz-Kult.
Video: Sara Keller & Susanne Rau at the Bhopal Literature & Art Festival 2024
In January 2024, Prof. Dr. Susanne Rau and Dr. Sara Keller (both University of Erfurt) participated in one of India’s largest events dedicated to literature, the Bhopal Literature and Art Festival.
