Category: Research Moment
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Alex Jordan on the Göttingen Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle & Paul de Lagarde
Thanks to my fellowship at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, I have been able to unearth some previously unpublished correspondence between the great Scottish man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Professor Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891), a Göttingen Orientalist and notorious German nationalist. Conducted over the course of 1874–5 and conserved in the Lagarde Nachlass of the […]
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Sebastian Schirrmeister on Reading Elie Wiesel in Yiddish
In his famous preface to Elie Wiesel’s seminal Shoah memoir La Nuit (1958), the novelist and Nobel laureate François Mauriac offers an enthusiastic and disturbingly Catholic reading of Wiesel’s experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Promoting the writing of an unknown, stateless, young Jewish journalist to the French public, Mauriac paints an almost saintly picture of a […]
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Daniel Wildmann on Feelings about Jews: Morality and Emotions in German Film, 1914-2014
Dear Friends, As you know, I am working on a project entitled Feelings about Jews: Morality and Emotions in German Film, 1914-2014. I am currently working on the second chapter, which deals with films of the Weimar Republic. Paul Wegener’s film The Golem (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam [1921]) is one of […]
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Shiru Lim on Pappardelle, Pâte Feuilletée and Political Utterances
Hello colleagues—Kolleagues?—and whoever else who has happened to find this post. It’s an odd time to be writing about research—something that has most certainly taken a back seat in these stressful and alien circumstances. But it on occasion also serves as a welcome distraction from said circumstances. That, and nursing all my new hobbies. Like […]
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Alex Jordan on Thomas Carlyle and Isaac Ironside
I recently discovered a hitherto unknown letter by the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) to a certain Isaac Ironside (1808–70), dated 10 July 1855. Ironside was a leading radical, Chartist, and Owenite, and during the period in question, served as local councillor for the Ecclesall Ward of Sheffield. This was pleasing to […]
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Amandine Barb on Teaching about Religion in the USA
Since the beginning of the corona crisis, my time in home-office has mostly been spent completing two articles that are related to my on-going research project Governing Religious Diversity in a (Post)Secular Age: Teaching about Religion in American Public Schools. The basic question at the center of this project is: why and how religion, which […]
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Francesca Antonini on Caesarism
My research focuses on the concept of Caesarism. Linguistically speaking, Caesarism is a neologism closely connected to the political situation of mid-nineteenth-century France. In the words of the conservative pamphleteer Auguste Romieu (1800-1855), it describes the “domain of the sabre” which he hoped would be realised in the country. While referring to contextualised historical events, […]
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Martina Mampieri on Isaiah Sonne (1887-1960)
My research project as a Moritz Stern Fellow in Modern Jewish Studies at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg investigates the figure and scholarship of Isaiah Sonne (1887-1960), a pioneering although neglected scholar of Jewish Studies. Born in Galicia (Hapsburg Empire) and educated in Switzerland and Italy, he was active for almost twenty years in Italy up until the […]
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Deniz Kilincoglu on Exploring New Horizons of Research
The main mission of institutes for advanced study is to enable scholars to pursue curiosity-driven research that other, more conventional, academic institutions refrain from accommodating. Hence, as soon as I joined the Kolleg, I began implementing my long-standing ‘evil plan’ to pursue my scholarly passions, laying aside more ‘realistic’, short-range objectives. I had long been […]
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Ivan Gaskell on the Panza Collection Initiative
The project I hope to complete during my annual summer fellowship concerns the Panza Collection Initiative at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City. Between 1991 and 1992, the museum acquired more than 300 items by artists associated with Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptualism from Giovanna and Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. Among the artists represented […]