Gastgeber*innen und Gäste 2026
Tim Hertogh, Johanna Jebe, Melissa Kapitan und Rosamond McKitterick zu Gast bei Moritz Niens und Bastiaan Waagmeester (März 2026)
Moritz Niens, Baastian Waagmeester, Tim Hertogh, Johanna Jebe, Melissa Kapitan, Rosamond McKitterick
(© Privat, Privat, Privat, Privat, Olaf Christensen, Werner Maleczek)
From 23-28 March, Moritz Niens and Bastiaan Waagmeester are organising a project week at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut under the moniker Zeitlos aktuell. Die Vermittlung und Veränderung antiker Wissensbestände in mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. They have invited a small group of international experts for early medieval written culture to explore the common ground between their research projects, which primarily concern the study of manuscripts as historical artefacts and sources of knowledge.
Throughout the week, they plan to refine their methodological approaches through the discussion of new (theoretical) developments in the field, such as the use of handwritten text recognition, and to the test approaches by jointly examining medieval manuscripts at the Berlin State Library. The week will conclude with a colloquium on 27 March there, where the participants will present and discuss their findings.
Organisers:
Moritz Niens is a doctoral candidate and part of the chair for late antique and early medieval history at the Freie Universität Berlin. His dissertation is on the composition and transmission of the ecclesiastical history written by Cassiodorus and Epiphanius and its remarkable reuse during the Carolingian period centuries later.
Bastiaan Waagmeester is a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin and part of the chair for late antique and early medieval history. His current project investigates the role of religious education in Christian identity formation using numerous expositions of the Lord's Prayer written by both patristic and anonymous authors.
Guests:
Tim Hertogh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oslo and part of the Minitexts-Project. He is completing his dissertation on charms and incantations written in the margins of early medieval manuscripts.
Johanna Jebe is a postdoctoral researcher at the medieval history seminar at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. She is interested in the development of early medieval monasticism, the study of manuscripts and, specifically, the potential of library lists to investigate how monks perceived themselves and their communities.
Melissa Kapitan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Minitexts-Project at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include Christian liturgy and the history of monasticism, which she explored in her PhD thesis that is concerned with understanding embodied spirituality in Carolingian monasticism through its sensory history.
Rosamond McKitterick is professor emerita of medieval history at Cambridge University and a leading expert in the field of early medieval manuscript research. She is
currently investigating whether knowledge and use of the past shaped political identities during the early Middle Ages. She is particularly interested in Rome, Italy, and the Franks.
Erica Baffelli zu Gast bei Frederik Schröer (Juli 2026)
Frederik Schröer, Erica Baffelli
(© Schröer, Baffelli)
The project “Feeling with the Trouble: Affective Entanglements in and Beyond the Human” represents an interdisciplinary engagement with so-called “negative” emotions in the interlocking crises affecting human and more-than-human lives past and present. Emotions like anxiety, fear, grief, or anger are central to the experience of events such as pandemics, wars, fascism, and ecological disasters in the Anthropocene era. Simultaneously, they are shaped by history as much as they impact it in turn. We take up Donna Haraway’s urge for “Staying with the Trouble” to engage with the complexity (and messiness) of (negatively-coded) emotions, exploring their centrality to the entanglements and interrelations between humans and the more-than-human.
Our collaboration within the framework of the Dahlem Junior Host Program includes hosting Erica Baffelli at the Freie Universität Berlin (Department of Global History) from July 1-9, deepening our interdisciplinary collaboration, and strengthening Freie Universität as a central node in the international Fear Research Network (FeRN). A one-day workshop on July 3rd will serve as a platform to discuss a programmatic research article co-authored with Jane Caple and Zhaokun Xin, with invited participants from multiple European universities.
Frederik Schröer is a postdoctoral researcher in Global History at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute, Freie Universität Berlin (Chair of Prof. Dr. Sebastian Conrad). His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century South Asia, global Buddhism, emotions, concepts, the environment, and the more-than-human. Following his PhD on the history of emotions in the early Tibetan diaspora, his current work traces human-environment relations among Buddhist and other religious reformers in late colonial India. He is editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Contributions to the History of Concepts (Berghahn).
Erica Baffelli is Professor of Japanese Studies at The University of Manchester (UK). She is interested in religion in contemporary Japan, with a focus on groups founded from the 1970s onwards. Her research projects and publications focus on religion in contemporary Japan; religion and media; new and minority religions; religion, gender, and violence; and Buddhism and emotions. She is currently PI on a Leverhulme Research Project on "Fear and Belonging in Minority Buddhist Communities" (2023-2027). She is co-editor, with Michael Stausberg and Alexander Van Der Haven, of the open-access publication Religious Minorities Online (De Gruyter Brill).
Workshop Participants
Maria Elena Bedoya (independent)
Jane Caple (University of Manchester)
Danilo D’Arpino (University of Manchester)
Alice Dehon (University of Manchester)
Linda Zampol D’Ortia (Ca’ Foscari University Venice)
Farha Noor (Freie Universität Berlin)
Zhaokun Xin (University of Manchester)
Elsa Kugelberg und Henrik Kugelberg zu Gast bei Luise Müller (September 2026)
Luise Müller, Elsa Kugelberg, Henrik Kugelberg
(© alle privat)
Equality and the Digital Private Sphere
The question of what it means to lead a good life in the digital private sphere seems urgent, and especially so in the face of the social pathologies that are connected to digital technologies, like manipulation, bullying, scams, stalking, or doxxing. Through normative philosophical analysis, we want to work out what the good life can look like in the context of the digital private sphere. We aim to focus our analysis on mainly two aspects: first, which values are at stake in the digital private sphere, and what changes with the fact that our private sphere becomes increasingly digitalised? Second, we explore whether a social egalitarian paradigm – broadly, that social relations are good for us individually and collectively when they are egalitarian – is useful for understanding the challenges of leading a good life in the digital private sphere. Can the social ideal of equality offer a normatively attractive vision of the good life in the digital private sphere?
Elsa Kugelberg is a political theorist at the University of Oxford. She specialises in normative political theory and normative ethics. In particular, Elsa studies what it means for the state and major institutions to exercise power over individuals, how that power can be justified to us, and what we owe to each other. She is a member of Oxford Center for the Study of Social Justice and affiliated with the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Australian National University, and the Ethical Dating Online research network.
Henrik Kugelberg is an assistant professor of moral and political philosophy at the University of Warwick, an associate member of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford, and a research affiliate at the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Australian National University. Henrik‘s work focuses on the political philosophy of artificial intelligence and the digital public sphere.
Luise Müller is a lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. In her research, she focuses on normative philosophy of AI, and in particular, how egalitarian ideals can inform how we shape digital technologies. She teaches mainly in moral and political philosophy, and has previously written on the idea of political authority, international criminal justice, human rights and animal ethics.
Weitere Gastgeber*innen, Gäste und Projekte der DJHP-Kohorte 2026 folgen alsbald.