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Dear friends and colleagues,

We are taking a one-week break with our colloquia and will be back on 31 May with our Senior Research Fellow Birgit Meyer presenting her research project.

In today’s Wednesday Weekly we have recommendations for two workshops and a conference for you. We would also like to share with you a Call for Applications.

And finally, we would like to remind you that tomorrow, 18 May, is Ascension Day and a Public Holiday in Germany. This means, among other things, that stores will be closed tomorrow and we will not be in the office either (which of course does not mean that you will not have access to the office if you need or want to).

Enjoy and have a good week!

Anja & Lucy

Conference on “Religious and secularistic concepts of Universalism/Particularism”, 25–26 May at the University of Munich

Religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam have universalistic potentials; at the same time, they have manifold traditions of confining morality to the internal life of religious and political communities. Secular universalism arose not least from the effort to construct a universalistic morality beyond all confessional traditions out of the factual particularism of religions. Religious and secular-humanist justifications of universalism intertwined since the Enlightenment. Since the Romantic period, a close connection of religious and secular particularist semantics can also be observed. This conference is especially interested in religious or secular concepts that have acquired political relevance in recent contemporary history. It also studies the competition of liberal, at least superficially secular designs of political orders (e.g. the Charter of Paris 1990 or the model of economic globalization) with religiously charged models of order in contemporary European history.

The conference is organized by the Centre for Advanced Studies “Universalism and Particularism in European Contemporary History” at the University of Munich. Conference listeners are asked to register by writing an e-mail and to indicate the panels they would like to participate in.

25–26 May

University of Munich, Historical Seminar, Seidlvilla, Nikolaipl. 1B, 80802 Munich AND online

Workshop on “Fashioning Perceptions: Images of Japan at the turn of the twentieth century”, 2–3 June at Heidelberg University

Our Junior Researcher Elisabeth Marx draws our attention to this workshop on “Fashioning Perceptions: Images of Japan at the turn of the twentieth century”, convened by the Institute for Japanese Studies and the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University.

The time frame of this workshop will be the years right before, during and after the Russo-Japanese War and the question of how Japan was seen in the rest of the world and concretely in some of the European countries, like Germany, Hungary, and Romania. The workshop will try to trace the changing images of Japan, and focus on the question how Japan itself was shaping its own perception on an international scale. Diplomats, translators, activists, masters of Japanese arts were engaged in different ways in refurbishing the image of Japan to win favor in the world.

Here you find the zoom link and registration details.

2–3 June

Heidelberg University, Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies AND online via zoom

Workshop on “Urbanity & the formation of religious groups”, 15–16 June at the University of Erfurt

We would like to point you to this workshop on “Urbanity and the formation of religious groups”, convened by the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” at the University of Erfurt.

The workshop’s central question is: How has an “urban way of life” influenced the genesis of different religious and confessional groups? The working hypothesis of the workshop is that by considering the mutual formation of religion and urbanity, we can also gain new insights into the phenomenon of religious group formation(s) and find new ways to understand how, when and why, groups formed and how they were visible (or invisible) in cities. Many of the processes of group formations show that both local and trans-regional points of reference played a part, which is why the workshop takes a broad geographical view.

Prior registration is necessary.

15–16 June

Haus Dacheröden, Anger 37, Erfurt

Job opportunities: 11 PhD positions at Marburg Centre for the Ancient World, starting 1 November

At the Marburg Centre for the Ancient World at the Philipps University Marburg, eleven part-time PhD positions (65% of regular working hours) are available at the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Staging Religious Atmosphere in Ancient Cultures” for a limited period of three years, as of 1 November.

The Research Training Group investigates the “Staging of Religious Atmosphere in Ancient Cultures” on the basis of textual and material sources with interdisciplinary cooperation. The group will pursue a teaching and learning community that is open to new theoretical and methodological approaches as well as innovative presentation formats; the fellows will have extensive opportunities to participate in shaping this. Welcome are proposals for doctoral projects from the following subjects: Ancient History, Old Testament, Ancient Oriental Studies, Christian Archaeology and Byzantine Art History, Greek Studies, Historical-Comparative Linguistics, Classical Archaeology, Latin Studies, New Testament, Law with a focus on Roman Law, and Religious Studies/History of Religion with a focus on early Islam.

Application deadline: 11 June

If you have any content that you think suits the purpose of the weekly, please feel free to send it to us at multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de.