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Tagged: Modern History

Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Personal Reflections

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…

Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Personal Reflections

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…

Billets / Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Europe

‘Of Looseness and Depravity’ – Contextualising Magdalene Asylums

Why was the Seán Mc Dermott St Magdalene asylum – which contained also a Magdalene Laundry – located where it was? And how does this placing relate to discourses on Irish women in the city? The article offers an introduction to the historical context of the Magdalene Laundries in nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.

Billets / Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Europe

Digging, uncovering, unearthing: Activist and academic approaches to Irish Magdalene Laundries

How did aspects of gender, faith and class interplay in Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries? And which position do they occupy in Irish discourse today? The article charts both activist and academic approaches to the Magdalen Laundries in the past decades, and how aspects of gender, faith and class interplayed in them.

Billets / Book Reviews & Exhibitions / Case Studies / Personal Reflections

Review of Nina Kreibig, Institutionalisierter Tod: Die Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte der Berliner Leichenhäuser im 19. Jahrhundert

Die Beschäftigung mit Sterben und Tod hat Konjunktur. Nina Kreibig hat eine wichtige Studie vorgelegt, in der sie die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Leichenhäuser in Berlin grundlegend und quellengesättigt rekonstruiert. Rezension von Carolin Kosuch.

Personal Reflections

The Beauty of Ukraine – A Personal Account

Turning on the TV or scrolling through the news, one will always find the dramatic photos of my country being attacked. I am here in Erfurt, participating in a research project and I would like to introduce you to my country…

Case Studies / Personal Reflections / South Asia

Walking along Prince Anwar Shah Road, Kolkata

Prince Anwar Shah Road, stretched between Jadavpur Police Station to the east and Tipu Sultan Shahi Masjid to the west, where Anwar Shah Road meets Deshapran Shasmal Road, has a unique demography consisting of multiple neighbourhoods, economic zones and a complex juxtaposition of urban deliberations…

Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Europe / The Mediterranean

Open-Air Preaching and a Muslim Festival: Religious Rituals, Violence, and Urban Space in mid-19th Century Belfast and early-20th Century Jerusalem

Conflicts between different religious groups were a frequent occurrence in cities of the British Empire, particularly from the Victorian era to the interwar period. The imperial agents had a paternalist and orientalist perspective on these episodes of communal violence and assessed them as uncivilized manifestations of religious fanaticism…

Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Personal Reflections

Disability and the City. Deep Hope and Creativity in a Sacred Site in Amritsar

Sacred sites have a special propensity to attract not just people of faith but also those with ailments and disabilities seeking a cure and/or better life. They draw those with deep hope, especially when recourse to other avenues of healing come with less conviction or even fail them…

Concepts & Theory / Personal Reflections / The Mediterranean

Describing ‘religion’ in European History Needs a New Concept

Religion has played an important role in European history in a number of ways. On the one hand, as a phenomenon it shaped individual regions as religious and cultural areas and often influenced the designation of larger territories (e. g. ‘Catholic Europe’) as well as individual regions or places determined by religious difference….