Research projects

C D E F G I J M N P R S T

Catholic Women Writers as Products and Producers of "Catholic Femininity"?

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jörg Seiler Duration
09/2016 - 09/2023 Funding
Several donors
300 000 €

Jörg Seiler: The anti-modernist phase of Catholicism was characterized by normative Catholic ascriptions of femininity, which mostly obscured the pluralization dynamics of these decades. Persistence, change and (un)simultaneous emancipative ideas about a Catholic gender order should therefore be reconstructed in church history on the basis of biographical sources and literary works of Catholic women writers. As representatives of a liberal profession, they represented an unbound heterogeneous…

Charts - Oceans

Project management
Several Duration
07/2018 - 04/2022 Funding
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF):
1 100 000 €

Iris Schröder & Felix Schürmann: Maps have hitherto led a marginal existence in the history of globalization. Sea and ocean charts receive even less attention, despite their unique visualization of maritime spaces and their inherent global connections. The aim of the joint project is to use sea and ocean charts to tell a little-known story in the period of transformation dating from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.

Cinema in the GDR – Reception History 'from Below'

Project management
Several Duration
06/2019 - 05/2022 Funding
Several donors
456 000 €

Christiane Kuller: Until now, the history of GDR cinema has been written primarily as a history of state film policy and production, with research largely ignoring the perspective of moviegoers. This is the point of departure for the citizen science research project "Cinema in the GDR", whose goal is to develop an everyday history of GDR cinema together with contemporary witnesses.

Contested Democracy. Gender, race and sex in US American history

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Martschukat Duration
01/2021 - 12/2024 Funding
Gerda Henkel Stiftung:
161 000 €

The project investigates struggles for hegemony and democracy along the lines of gender, race and sex in the form of a conflict history of the USA in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.

Cooperation Project "Local Politicization of Global Norms"

Project management
Several Duration
01/2014 - 12/2017 Funding
Several donors
490 000 €

André Brodocz: The project examines the conditions under which egalitarian norms with a global claim to validity (such as human rights, sustainability, rule of law) actually find acceptance.

Denomination - Education - Politics

Project management
Prof. Dr. Michael Gabel Duration
09/2012 - 09/2017 Funding
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF):
500 000 €

Michael Gabel: The BMBF-funded project is a fundamental investigation in the field of cultural education for about 40 locations of student communities (KSG and ESG) in Eastern Germany. On the basis of the research results to be published, this will open up a wide range of scientific projects for universities, colleges, social science institutions and institutions of political education: in the fields of politics, (contemporary) history, education, sociology, philosophy, theology, law, ethics and…

Dictatorship Experience and Transformation

Project management
Prof. Dr. Christiane Kuller Duration
01/2019 - 09/2025 Funding
Several donors
1 500 000 €

The starting point of the project is the assumption that not only individual and collective experiences during the GDR (German Democratic Republic - DDR) itself, but also the deep biographical upheavals of the post-reunification period shape the memory of the GDR. In the following decade, the political debates of 1989/90 gave rise to a conflict of memory that continues to have an impact today. This determines the time frame of the project, which takes a look at the last two decades of the GDR…

Digital Indexing of the Estate of Jan Tschichold

Project management
Prof. Dr. Dr. Patrick Rössler Duration
10/2019 - 04/2021 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
110 000 €

Patrick Rössler: The importance of pictoral representations in the process of political communications is undisputed, but little is known about the standards of media image reporting in the first half of the 20th century. The aim of the proposed research project is therefore identifying empirically supported findings on longer, possibly even decades-spanning developments in this area, in order to arrive at statements about continuities and discontinuities in visual political communication and to…

Eastern Christians and the Republic of Letters between the 16th and 18th centuries

Project management
Prof. Dr. Vasilios N. Makrides Duration
01/2019 - 12/2021 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
45 000 €

Vasilios N. Makrides: The Republic of Letters, a wide network of intellectuals, also has an Eastern side with numerous actors communicating in Greek, Latin, Arabic or Slavic languages (especially on religious issues). Despite the existence of extensive sources, this topic has rarely been studied interdisciplinary and from an "entangled history" perspective. In order to enable a more complete cartography of this East-West exchange (16th-18th century), this project will bring together scholars of…

Edition of the Correspondence of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

Project management
Prof. Dr. Martin Mulsow Duration
04/2010 - 10/2015 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
336 998 €

The project was dedicated to the indexing of the correspondence of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), a central figure in the biological and geological science of the late 18th century, which is of great importance in the history of science.

Educational Landscape and Knowledge Culture

Project management
Several Duration
07/2014 - 05/2017 Funding
Several donors
290 000 €

Gotha was one of the most important centres of innovation in early modern European educational history. In the project, collections-based research will be carried out using the educational history sources collected in the 17th and early 18th centuries with the aim of making the hitherto almost unknown holdings accessible to science and the public and demonstrating their potential for international research in educational history.

Expansion of the Gotha Research Library into a Research and Study Centre for the Cultural History of Protestantism in the Early Modern Period

Project management
Dr. Kathrin Paasch Duration
03/2015 - 02/2018 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
534 000 €

The Gotha Research Library preserves an outstanding collection of sources on the cultural history of Protestantism in the early modern period. This is the basis of the six-year infrastructure project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), in which the library combines coordinated activities for the cataloguing and preservation of this important and hitherto largely unexplored material with the further development of its digital services and transfers the results of its work to science…

Forgotten Bauhaus Women. Fates of life in the 1930s and 1940s

Project management
Prof. Dr. Dr. Patrick Rössler Duration
10/2021 - 01/2022

Patrick Rössler: The exhibition project "Forgotten Bauhaus Women" by the University of Erfurt and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar is dedicated to researching these fates, of which more than thirty will be presented at the Bauhaus Museum Weimar from October 2021.

Globalisation and Local Knowledge

Project management
Prof. Dr. Susanne Rau Duration
09/2012 - 02/2016 Funding
Several donors
300 000 €

The research project is to be understood as a pilot project, which is intended to comprehensively demonstrate the research potential of the cartographic-geographical "The Gotha Perthes Collection" acquired by the Free State of Thuringia in 2003 for the first time. In addition, it is intended to contribute to the further development of the collection and to establish a virtual map laboratory, the "GlobMapLaboratory".

Illuminati Essays in the Context of the Late Enlightenment

Project management
Prof. Dr. Martin Mulsow Duration
05/2013 - 11/2016 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
503 000 €

Previous research on the Illuminati has concentrated mainly on their organisational structure and on the so-called 'higher knowledge'. Consequently, the documents of the order have so far been mainly printed documents, degree drafts and the correspondence of the leading members among each other. In contrast to this, the project pursued at the Gotha Research Centre focuses on a completely new corpus of sources, which has so far hardly been considered by research.

Jacopo Stradas Magnum ac Novum Opus

Project management
Prof. Dr. Martin Mulsow Duration
11/2015 - 05/2022 Funding
Several donors
1 263 000 €

Jacopo Strada (ca. 1515-1588), antiquarian, architect and antique dealer, created a corpus of 30 volumes, the Magnum ac Novum Opus, for his patron Johann Jakob Fugger in the mid-16th century. The project is intended to bring together the entire corpus for the first time, analyse it in its historical and artistic context, research its sources and work out its significance for the history of numismatics and antiquarian research in the 16th century.

M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies "Metamorphoses of the Political" (ICAS-MP)

Project management
Several Duration
08/2015 - 06/2027 Funding
Several donors
380 519 €

Martin Fuchs: ICAS-MP combines the benefits of an open, interdisciplinary forum for intellectual exchange with the advantages of a cutting-edge research centre. The centre focuses on key political processes that have emerged in parallel in many parts of the world during the twentieth century through to the present day, processes that are entangled yet heterogeneous.

Meeting places of the MfS and places of dissidence in Erfurt

Project management
Prof. Dr. Christiane Kuller Duration
01/2019 - 09/2025

Subproject in the research network "Dictatorship Experience and Transformation". The project focuses on two concrete spaces of experience and action in the urban landscape of the GDR and the perceptions and memories associated with them.

Moving Networks

Project management
Prof. Dr. Dr. Patrick Rössler Duration
01/2013 - 02/2016 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
450 000 €

Patrick Rössler: Although the institutional framework of the leading art and design school of its time disintegrated with the closure of the Bauhaus in April 1933, it continued to exist as a virtual structure of various networks of its members, which were to be examined empirically and whose formation often went back far into the history of the school. From this perspective, the history of the Bauhaus during the politically explosive period of the 1930s and 1940s can be continued in a…

NFDI4memory

Project management
Several Duration
03/2023 - 02/2028

The research institutions located on the Gotha Research Campus of the University of Erfurt - Gotha Research Library and Gotha Research Centre as well as the Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection - are participating together with other partners in the so-called NFDI-4Memory consortium led by the Leibniz Institute for European History (IEG) in Mainz. 4Memory is one of several consortia in Germany that are working together to build a long-term and sustainable National Research Data…

Neopaganism in Contemporary Greece: Beliefs, Practices, and the Symbolic Struggle over Hellenicity/Greekness

Project management
Several Duration
09/2024 - 08/2027 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
342 000 €

The research project examines Neopaganism in contemporary Greece, focussing on beliefs, ritual practices and the symbolic struggle for the Greek heritage. It analyses the many facets of this movement and its critical engagement with the Greek Orthodox Church and state and academic institutions.

Nutrition, Health and Modern Society: Germany and the United States

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Martschukat Duration
10/2015 - 10/2018 Funding
VolkswagenStiftung:
1 000 000 €

The research project aims to work out the significance of nutrition and health for the order of modern societies from the 19th century to the present. The empirical focus is on the USA and Germany, so that regional differences as well as the dynamics of interdependence in globalizing constellations become apparent.

Politiken der Wahrheit. Erfurter Forschungsstelle für politische Epistemologien

Project management
Several Duration
01/2023 - 03/2025 Funding
Several donors
349 000 €

The research centre aims to address questions of the political configuration of knowledge and its basic parameters, in particular the social effects of the politics of truth. Institutionally, the research centre serves as a continuation of the university's internally funded research group "Praxeologies of Truth", the networking of corresponding basic research in the humanities and social sciences and a coordinated acquisition of third-party funding.

Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict

Project management
Several Duration
04/2022 - 03/2026 Funding
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF):
4 000 000 €

The Network investigates how historically formed postcolonial hierarchies manifest themselves in contemporary conflict dynamics and what implications this has for sustainable conflict transformation in the future. To do so, the Network brings together historical perspectives on the contexts of conflict formation (in particular those shaped by colonialism) with postcolonial research perspectives as well as with methodologies and theories of peace and conflict research.These perspectives are…

Property and habit. On the political anthropology of ownership in Western modernity

Project management
Several Duration
01/2021 - 12/2024

Subproject in the SFB TRR294 "Structural Change of Property". The project is dedicated to the political anthropology of ownership between the eighteenth and early twentieth century. It investigates an assumption that is widespread in the humanities: that ownership structures bring about the formation of specific habits.

Protecting Academia At Risk: Towards a New Policy Agenda for a Thriving Culture of higher education in Europe

Project management
Prof. Dr. Bernhard Kleeberg Duration
03/2024 - 02/2026 Funding
Gerda Henkel Stiftung:
183 000 €

The current situation of academia at risk in the European landscape raises three distinct research questions. First, what is the current institutional framework that responds to academic displacement in Europe? Second, what are the normative contours of protecting academic freedom in future democratic societies? Third, how does an improved system of integrating displaced academics connect to broader values such as the protection of a thriving academic culture? This project builds on our seed…

Reaching for Atlantis

Project management
Dr. Bernhard Schirg Duration
03/2018 - 02/2023 Funding
VolkswagenStiftung:
1 000 000 €

In his project, the historian wants to investigate the history of objects that were the subject of a fundamental reinterpretation of material culture at the time of the Swedish Empire (1650-1720).

Science and Orthodox Christianity around the World (SOW)

Project management
Prof. Dr. Vasilios N. Makrides Duration
01/2016 - 12/2019

Vasilios N. Makrides: The Project SOW - Science & Orthodoxy around the World focuses on the dialogue between science and religion in the Orthodox Christian world. More than 50 specialists from 15 countries participate from various academic fields such as Science, Philosophy, History, Theology and Education.

The Historical Sources of the Reformation and Historiography of the Early 18th Century at Friedenstein Castle Gotha

Project management
Dr. Kathrin Paasch Duration
05/2014 - 04/2017 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
270 000 €

The Gotha Research Library preserves a top-class collection on the cultural history of Protestantism in the early modern period, which was compiled by the Dukes of Saxony-Gotha. An essential component of this unique handwritten tradition, which reaches far beyond the Central German cultural area, is the estate of the theologian and church historian Ernst Salomon Cyprian (1673-1745), which is to be catalogued in the project.

The Visualization of the Political in German Magazines 1905 to 1945

Project management
Prof. Dr. Dr. Patrick Rössler Duration
04/2016 - 10/2019 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
200 000 €

Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Historical Analysis in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives

Project management
Dr. Ned Richardson-Little Duration
10/2021 - 09/2025 Funding
VolkswagenStiftung:
376 360 €

Sub-project of Dr. Ned Richardson-Little within the international project "Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Historical Analysis in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives", based at the University of Jena and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation within the framework of the funding programme "Challenges for Europe".

Service: Report research project

You would like to report your project to us? Please use the form below to report your research project and send it to the e-mail address below. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions: