Research Highlight

Research Fellowship Prof. Dr. Ulrike Brunotte
From September 2017 to August 2018, Prof. Dr. Ulrike Brunotte (Associate professor at the CGD) was research fellow within the Spinoza-prize-funded research field “Religious matters in an entangled world. Things, food, bodies and texts as entry points to the material study of religion in plural settings”, chaired by Prof. Dr. Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University).
“The guiding idea of this research program is that religion becomes concrete and palpable through people, whose ideas and practices imply the use of various materials – including buildings, images, objects, and texts – and whose bodies and senses are shaped through these ideas and performative practices. Taking a material approach to religion, the project looks at the acts and material forms through which religions are present, coexist and possibly clash with each other in particular plural settings. The complex configurations of religious coexistence are studied by focusing on religious matters such as things (especially buildings and images), bodies and texts as entry points.” Besides working as a co-supervisor in individual consultations, Ulrike presented her projects at several conferences and PhD-seminars, and contributed to a research day at the KNAW Meertens Institute with workshops on Aby Warburg’s theory of pictorial remembrance, Jane Ellen Harrison’s contribution to the performative turn in religious studies; genealogies of a material approach to religion; Gender and race in Orientalism and Antisemitism.
Selected lectures and workshops were:

  • The “Beautiful Jewess” as Frontier Figure in Germany’s Internal Colonialism”. Lecture and workshop at the KNAW-Meertens Institute, 23.01.2018.
  • Jane Ellen Harrison’s Early Contestations of the textual paradigm in Religious Studies. Invited lecture and workshop in the research field “Materila Religion”, Utrecht, 09.02.2018.
  • Body Memory and the Expressive Values of the Past. Pathos and Motion in Aby Warburg’s Theory of Pictorial Memory. 16.03.2018.
  • ‘The Perfect Whiteness of the Snow’. The Symbolism of Color and Light in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Conference contribution: Religion and Light, 14.-15.June 2018.

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Brunotte