Max-Weber-Kolleg welcomes new fellows and fellows for the summer semester 2025

For the collaborative research group "Religion and Urbanity", headed by Susanne Rau and Jörg Rüpke, the fellows are: Irene Becci and her project "A quarry or a sacred mount? About the relation to nature in the context of urbanisation", Bärbel Beinhauer-Köhler with her project "Walls and Fortifications in Medieval Cairo – Agents of Religious Plurality, Politics, and Economic Life", Maria Ciesla with her project "Microhistory of Coexistence. Jews and Christians in a Premodern Town. The Case of Slutsk (Słuck)", Francesco Ferrari with his project "Martin Buber's Conception of the Kibbutz: Communi-tarian Experiment or Theopolitical Utopia?", Agnes Flora with her project "Laus Deo Semper. Overlapping layers of religious thought and popular belief in the early modern town of Cluj", Espita Halder with her project "Karbala-complex and the Shi'as' Right to the City: Kolkata and Dhaka in South-South urban net-work", Eduard Iricinschi with his project "The Righteous One in the City of the King' (The Chapters of the Wisdom of My Lord Mani 356.1): Urban Technologies and Late Antique Manichaean Religious Net-works', Richard Lim with his project 'Religious Dualism and Urbanity in the Roman West: Part II', Silke Steets with her project 'Waco Reborn: The Formation of a Creative Evangelical Urbanity in Texas', and Martin Wallraff with his project 'How did Christianity become an Urban Religion? Roman Transformations in the Imperial Age".

Birgit Schäbler, who works on Global South Studies, has been appointed to the Social Philosophy and Social Theory research group.

As part of the Merian Centre ICAS:MP (Metamorphoses of the Political) in Delhi, Peter Gottschalk will once again be a guest in Erfurt. He will be researching "Emotional Dimen-sions of British and American Newspaper Reporting on Muslims and Hindus, 1798–1809".

The International Graduate School "Resonant Self-World Relations" welcomes Steen Lybke and Nicole Navratil as (guest) doctoral researchers at the Max-Weber-Kolleg. Steen Lybke is working on a dissertation on "Scandinavian ecotheology in an international perspective: Sovereign expressions of life, resonance, and the good life in a time of ecological crisis". Nicole Navratil is researching her dissertation project on "Per-forming the Nation – and Womanhood? The self-staging of female leaders of to-day's nationalist parties in Europe".

The Collaborative Research Centre "Structural Change of Property" will be strength-ened in the new semester by Cinnamon Ducasse, who will be conducting research as a postdoctoral researcher on "Ambiguous Property: From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages" and Jana Ilnicka, who is working on the dispute over property in the Middle Ag-es. The research group also welcomes the doctoral students Juliana Hutai and Yuxuan Ren, who are working on "Property as a World Relationship: Disposing, Caring, Utilising – A Comparative Analysis in Germany and China".

The ERC Advanced Grant "(De)Colonising Sha-ria?", newly established at the Max-Weber-Kolleg. Tracing Transformation, Change and Continuity in Islamic Law in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the 19th and 20th Centuries" under the direc-tion of Irene Schneider welcomes Lena-Maria Möller, who is researching selected as-pects of the pre- and post-colonial transition of Qatar's legal and judicial system.

Hartmut Rosa and Jörg Rüpke, directors of the Max-Weber-Kolleg: “We are delighted to welcome so many exciting academics from Germany and abroad to Erfurt once again and look forward to exchanging ideas with them.”