Since October 2012 Martin van Gelderen is professor for European Intellectual History at the University of Göttingen. He was assistant professor at the TU Berlin (1989-1994) and Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex (1995-2003). In 2003 he returned to his alma mater, the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, where he had obtained his PhD in 1988. Between 2003 and 2012 he was Professor of European Intellectual history at the EUI.
During the last three decades the combination of academic management and research has been characteristic for his career. He was Director of the Graduate Research Center in the Humanities at Sussex, Dean of Graduate Studies at the EUI (from 2008 until 2012) and director of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
In terms of scholarship the emphasis has been on the history of political and religious thought, in particular on European traditions of republicanism and on debates on religious toleration. He has been working on a new scholarly edition of the diaries of Anne Frank since 2013. The Dutch editio princeps and a number of translations are forthcoming. Research plans for the years to come include a new English edition and translation of Hugo Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis/The Laws of War and Peace for the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought and the monograph Between Erasmus and Rembrandt: Visual and Textual Debates on Republican Politics.
Jonas Gerlings is an intellectual historian of the Enlightenment with an emphasis on the Baltic Sea Region and its global contexts. He is currently a Marie Curie Global Fellow at the University of Göttingen and a recent Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago. His project examines Immanuel Kant's cosmopolitanism in the light of his lectures on Geography and Anthropology. In 2017 he received his PhD in Intellectual history from the European University Institute for a thesis on Immanuel Kant. An historian by training, my main research interests lie in early modern and Enlightenment political thought and intellectual history. My research, thus far, has focused on two fields of study, the first of which concerns the history of Scandinavian and European monarchies in the early modern period. What particularly intersts me in this context are the changing perceptions amongst monarchists and republicans alike of the nature and scope of monarchical power, not least in relation with questions about freedom. What how they were justified and repudiated by monarchists and republicans. My second field of research concerns the intellectual history of the Enlightenment in Scandinavia, focusing especially on the moral, religious, and political thought of the Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg, one of the pioneering figures of the early northern Enlightenment.Team
Institutsdirektor
Selected Recent Publications
Geschäftsführerin
Nach dem Studium der Germanistik, Ethnologie und Romanistik in Göttingen und der Promotion als Stipendiatin der Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung an der FU Berlin, arbeitete ich von 2012 bis zu seiner Schließung 2021 am Lichtenberg-Kolleg, dem Institute for Advanced Study der Universität Göttingen.
Mit Eröffnung des Moritz-Stern-Instituts der Philosophischen Fakultät habe ich dort die stellvertretende geschäftsführende Leitung übernommen. Neben der Betreuung der am Institut arbeitenden Gastwissenschaftler*innen koordiniere ich die Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Abteilungen und Institutionen der Universität und arbeite administrativ.
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Wissenschaftler*innen
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Gastwissenschaftler
As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Moritz Stern Institute, University of Göttingen, I will be researching a project entitled “REFORMARCHY: The Reforming Spirit in the Age of Revolutions: The Counts of Bernstorff, Commercial Monarchy, and the Invention of Modern Liberty”. A study of enlightened reform in eighteenth-century Denmark, the project focuses on two reform-minded Hanoverian counts, who served as chief ministers to the Danish monarchy, that is, Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff (1712-1772) and his nephew Andreas Peter von Bernstorff (1735-1797). Through a detailed study of the personal, professional, and intellectual networks of the Counts of Bernstorff, the project reconstructs a series of entanglements and exchanges between Copenhagen, Geneva, and Göttingen in the eighteenth century. In so doing, the project aims to elucidate the economic and political ideas that shaped the reform programme of the Bernstorffs and their European connections, and to recover their main contribution to Enlightenment thought, that is, their vision of modern liberty in a commercial monarchy.
Prof. Dr. Martin van Gelderen
Dr. Kora Baumbach
Heidemarie Hopf
Dr. Jonas Gerlings
Dr. Brian Kjær Olesen
Ehemalige Wissenschaftler*innen