Category: Talks & Papers

Urban Temporalities (City Walk 9)

Our 9th City Walk engaged with the topic of temporalities of which we discussed three aspects: the question of multiple memories with the visit of the new Synagogue in Erfurt, spatial unity and temporal multiplicity at the St Ägidien church, and, finally, hierarchical temporality with the Christmas market as a significant urban manifestation of the Christian temporality.

2024 Joint Conference: Urban Co-Temporalities

In February 2024, the UrbRel group together with the SpatioTemporality group at Erfurt university is organising an international conference on urban Co-Temporalities. The conference focuses on multiple temporalities within an urban environment that appear to coexist. It investigates the question of co-temporalities in the urban setting and asks whether such a concept could prove useful for analyzing the connectivity between co-extensive spaces.

UrbRel Workshop “Urbanity & the formation of religious groups”

How has an ‘urban way of life’ influenced the genesis of different religious and confessional groups? This June, UrbRel postdoc Martin Christ is convening a workshop setting out from this question. The working hypothesis of the workshop is that by considering the mutual formation of religion and urbanity, we can also gain new insights into the phenomenon of religious group formation(s) and find new ways to understand how, when and why, groups formed. The workshop will take place in June in Erfurt.

Conference report: Urbanity. History, Concept, Uses

Our 2022 annual conference was planned as an interdisciplinary event of with innovative format including three parts: a theoretical part on conceptual tools widely used by the KFG, a World Café and lightening talks. It took place in Ettersburg castle (Weimar) and continued on the results of two summer workshops. The conference looked at the concept of urbanity and its possible variations. How do we live (together) in dense urban spaces? How has urbanity been defined so far, how can we contribute to better grasp and describe it?

Attitudes, Atmospheres, Aspirations: Erfurt’s squares

Can we perceive Erfurt’s urbanity on its squares? In this hope, we hunted for perceptible atmospheres, attitudes and aspirations while other Erfurters went shopping, picked up their children or enjoyed the sun. The working hypothesis of our research group on “Religion and Urbanity” is that urbanity1 can be defined as a “way of life that emerges because of the size, density, diversity, mobility, instability, and transparency of a settlement or the people living there” (Rau 2020).2

Citification and Its Contents – What I owe to Robert A. Orsi

The title of this post is an outspokenly playful plagiarism of the English translation of Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), i.e., “Civilization and Its Discontents”. Likewise, the story of my developing spatial-critical approach to the historical study of urban religion can be said to have started with a plagiarism. What is a plagiarism, though? And is it so bad?

Field Notes from Kerala

The spokesperson of the UrbRel research group Susanne Rau spent the past weeks on a research trip to Kozhikode in India. Apart from co-organising the Workshop “Doing Spatial History” with the recent co-operation partners at Farook College, Kozhikode, she also contributed to the Sixth Kerala History Congress which took place in Tirurangadi…

Map of Paris in Early Middle ages

The Same Spaces Tell Different Religious Stories. Several Considerations on Cospatiality in Paris around 1300

The following considerations have arisen in the context of research into the religious and social contexts of religious writing around 1300. The search for “co-spatiality,” for “equality in space”, has its roots in socio-religious conflicts in the city of Paris, which in the first two decades of the fourteenth century led to the use of state and ecclesiastical power, including force and violence, by the Inquisition…

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