Congratulations to Susanne Rau on joining the Erfurt Academy of Public-Benefit Sciences
Susanne Rau, Professor for Spatial History at the University...
Author: urbrel
Awareness Concept for KFG Closing Conference
It is important to us that the conference fosters an inspiring exchange of ideas. We want to ensure that all participants feel comfortable and can benefit equally from the experience. To this end, we have developed an awareness concept…
Film Screening: World Station
As part of our closing conference on ‘Religion and Urbanity’, taking place from 1 to 5 June, we will be screening the new film ‘Gare du Monde’ [World Station] by Jacques Lévy, a former and highly esteemed KFG fellow, on Wednesday 3 June…
New Entry in KFG Glossary: Belonging
Belonging has become a key concept especially in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and in migration studies. Competing with the static and rigid concept of identity, belonging offers a more open, processual and relational framework for research…
KFG Closing Conference 2026
The KFG “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” (FOR 2779) is organising its closing conference “Religion and Urbanity New Research Paradigms for a Global Perspective?” on the 1-5 June 2026 in Erfurt. Since 2018, the research group “Religion and Urbanity” has challenged established views about urban structures, religious groups and their reciprocal formations. Over 100 Fellows have come together for longer and shorter stays, conferences, workshops and discussions. As the project is slowly coming to an end in the winter term 2026/27, it is time to look back and at the same time look to the future. What has this research perspective achieved? Has it changed the research landscape in the long term, and what needs to be modified and expanded? How can these topics be explored in greater depth or transferred to other areas?
CfP: Urbanity and Religion in Film
Our former fellow Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati has opened a call for papers on the topic of “Urbanity and Religion in Film”…
Conference Report: KFG Annual Conference “Making Boundaries”
While the topic of boundaries has received considerable scholarly attention, this conference focussed on the dynamic processes of making, maintaining and modifying or crossing boundaries and brought together scholars from various disciplines discussing case studies from Europe, the Mediterranean and South Asia from Antiquity to today…
Exploring Urban Religion in Poland: The Urban Religion Archive and the Religion Urbanity Mapping Project
This post introduces the Religion Urbanity Mapping (RUM) project. It started in 2021 with a dual focus. First, to rethink the concept of urban religion; and second, to apply this reframed concept in exploring the relatedness of religion and urbanity in the post-socialist CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) context. To date, the latter focus has been overlooked by urban studies and in the study of religion…
Conference Report: Necrogeographies of the Marginal Dead
Dealing with the dead and death is a topic that attracts scholars of every period. The universal question of transitioning from one state-of-being into the other represents a basic process applicable to every human being. As we all die one day and become part of the dead, their whereabouts and treatment will eventually affect every one of us. That is why this conference’s topic Necrogeographies of the Marginal Dead has a natural attraction to it because all of us will die one day and join the ranks of the dead…
2025 Entries in “Religion & Urbanity Online”
In 2025, there were 16 new entries in the database “Religion and Urbanity Online” so far. They cover the time span from antiquity to modernity, cities as different as Aleppo, Singapore and Sens, and approach religion and urbanity from a range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, literature studies and the history of religions. Enjoy reading!
14th City Walk: Built Nature
The 16th of April in 2025 was a warm and bright spring day, and a lovely environment for the KFG’s 14th City Walk: “Building Nature.” This program, organized by doctoral students Aileen Becker and Constanze Schaller together with spokesperson of the “Urbanity & Religion” research group Jörg Rüpke, introduced the newly-arrived cohort of fellows, as well as regular members, to some of the finer, greener points in Erfurt’s history.
The KFG and the “Urban Multilingualism” Workshop Series
The KFG “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” has an ongoing collaboration with the research project “Multilingualism in Eurasian Premodern Societies: Social Hierarchies and Space”, which is part of the Cluster of Excellence “EurAsian Transformations”. Three workshops are an important part of the “Multilingualism” project…
Making Boundaries 2025: Conference Programme
The programme for the KFG’s annual conference “Making Boundaries. Performing Religion and Urbanity” (4-6 June 2025, Erfurt) has now been released!
New Publication: Envisioning the Indian City
Our former fellow Supriya Chaudhuri has just published a new book entitled “Envisioning the Indian City: Spaces of Encounter in Goa, Calcutta, Pondicherry and Chandigarh”. The volume was published with Jadavpur University Press…
