The KFG “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” is pleased to announce its 2025 annual conference on “Making Boundaries – Performing Religion and Urbanity”. We cordially invite paper proposals engaging with the various aspects drafted in the concept note…
For a long time now, I’ve wanted to walk the streets of Calicut again. During my last visits (in March 2023 and January 2024), I didn’t really get around to it because I was in Feroke (on the southern bank of the Chaliyar river) for most of the time. Only once did I allow myself to drive into the city for a few hours to stock up on spices. I usually take an auto rickshaw (or tuk tuk), an incredulous choice for my fellow Indians. Couldn’t I, the European, afford a proper taxi?…
On 6 and 7 June 2024, the “Religion and Urbanity” research group held an international workshop in Erfurt entitled “Making New Faith In/Visible.” Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, the workshop delved into the critical, yet often underexplored question of how religious movements negotiate their visibility—or invisibility—within urban settings…
„Borders“ (Grenzen) is the topic of this year history competition of the state president of Germany by the Körber Foundation (Netzwerktagung zum Geschichtswettbewerb des Bundespräsidenten 2024/2025). To kick start the event, Sara Keller and Sebastian Dorsch have been invited to give an impulse talk at the preparatory workshop of the Körber Foundation…
Religion and urban life are the most successful strategies of handling, enhancing, and capitalizing on human sociability. By integrating religious studies, archaeology, and spatial theory, Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli aims to re-describe the formation of Christ religion as urban religion. Spanning almost four centuries of Christian literature from Paul to Augustine, the author shows that several characteristics commonly attributed to Christ religion are, in fact, outcomes of the distinct ways in which religious agents enact urbanity and interact with the urban space.
When visiting Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in the Panjabi city of Amritsar in India, it is virtually impossible to not notice bullet marks and other signs of destruction preserved in the gateways, walls and columns around the central sanctum sanctorum in the middle of the holy pool, sarovar.
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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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are interested in the connections between urbanity and religion.
This blog is connected to the DFG-funded Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” (FOR 2779). We are based at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University.
