Irene Dingel is a church historian with a focus on the early modern period. She is director of the Leibniz Institute for European History Mainz (IEG, Department of Occidental History of Religion). Her research focuses on the areas of Reformation and confessionalisation as well as the early Enlightenment in its Western European context. She heads the research and editing project "Controversia et Confessio", funded by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities and based at the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature. She was also spokesperson for the RTG "The Christian Churches before the Challenge of 'Europe'".
Heide Frielinghaus is a classical archaeologist with a thematic focus on war, cultural contacts and reception as well as a geographical focus on the areas of Greece and Lower Italy. A particular interest here is the (mutual) adoption or adaptation of, among other things, objects, (pictorial) themes or pictorial elements, or the demarcation against certain aspects or things associated with the other/foreign culture.
Heike Grieseris a church historian and patrologist. She is mainly concerned with social, cultural and legal history; her research also focuses on the history of piety in antiquity, with particular attention to the mutual relations between East and West (especially hagiographic literature and ancient popular belief). She is a member of the GRK 1728 "Theology as Science" (Frankfurt), the LWC Mainz "Byzantium between Orient and Occident" and the interdisciplinary AG "Kraftprobe Herrschaft".
Barbara Henning will expand the group of sponsors with the start of the second funding period from 1 April 2023. She has been a junior professor of the history of Islam in the Eastern Mediterranean at the Institute of History of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since September 2020. Her research interests lie in the areas of Ottoman-Kurdish history, history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, imperial elites, identity and memory politics, self-testimony research, and the history of knowledge and concepts. She is currently investigating questions of social difference and processes of demarcation in the Ottoman context using the example of the descendants of the Prophet.
Marietta Horster is an ancient historian whose research focuses on Greek religion and Roman administration in imperial times and late antiquity. Since 2002, she has also been researching the topic of literary interpretations of the world, in particular the organisation and transfer of knowledge. Her work on religion, on the transfer of interpretation and on the best possible rule and administration offers an important contribution to discussions on ancient and late antique forms of expression and concepts of interpretation.
Ludger Körntgen is a medieval historian with research interests in the early and high Middle Ages. He is particularly concerned with religious ideas as well as their consequences in the area of canon law norms and pastoral practice as well as in relation to legitimation, self-representation, political and religious behaviour of rulers. He is also interested in the question of the relationship between symbolic communication and military force, which is central to recent research on Ottonian-Salian kingship. He is co-editor of the publication series "Orbis mediaevalis" and the "Historisches Jahrbuch" of the Görres-Gesellschaft as well as general editor (with R. Meens/Utrecht) of the "Paenitentialia Franciae, Italiae et Hispaniae s. VIII-XI" in the Corpus Christianorum/Turnhout.
Jan Kusber is an Eastern European historian with an expertise in pre-modern Russia. He has worked intensively on Russian-Tataric encounters in the Middle Ages, on religion and confession in the early modern period, and on intercultural encounters between the elite cultures of the Russian Empire in the 18th century. In addition, he has worked on the change in the legitimation and representation of power from the Moscow Empire to the Petrine Empire, as well as on questions of cultural contact and transfer between the East Slavic and Islamic worlds.
Hans-Christian Maner is a historian of East Central and Southeast Europe. His work focuses, among other things, on topics of cultural and reception history from the time of Ottoman rule in south-eastern Europe. In addition to the significance of Byzantium in the Orthodox Church of the Romanian principalities, he pays particular attention to the dictum "Byzance après Byzance" in the Romanian cultural area. He has not only studied this conception of the historian Nicolae Iorga in detail, but also the bearers of these ideas, i.e. the ruling class of the Phanariots in the 18th century. In addition, he has examined the conception of rule of individual princes of Moldavia and Wallachia between the 15th and 18th centuries.
Johannes Pahlitzsch is a Byzantinist and Arabist and is intensively involved in cultural contacts and cultural transfer, especially between Byzantium and the Islamic world, but also between Latins and Byzantines at the time of the Crusades. One of the focal points of his work is the study of the Melkites, i.e. the Orthodox Christians under Islamic rule, focusing, among other things, on their legal status.
Klaus Pietschmann is a musicologist and historian. He is co-editor of the journal "Musiktheorie" and the series MARS (Musik und Adel im Rom des Sei- und Settecento), chairman of the editorial board of the Gluck-Gesamtausgabe, on the operative board of the supporting association of RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) and a member of the board of directors of the International Musicological Society as well as the DFG review board 103. His main research interests include church music of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, the music history of Italy, processes of canonisation in music and opera of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Dieter Quast (RGZM) is an archaeologist specialising in early history. He is a specialist in the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages, with a focus on long-distance trade, Late Antique and Early Medieval and Byzantine small finds, and cultural contacts between the Roman Empire and the Barbaricum. He has researched social tensions in 3rd century Central European Barbaricum triggered by return migrations and has just completed a BMBF-funded project exemplarily dealing with a long-distance trade good, the gemstone almandine. He has also presented a comprehensive monograph on the tomb of the Frankish king Childerich I.
Jörg Rogge is a medievalist and cultural historian. His research interests include the social and cultural conditions of the socialisation of fighters and warriors in medieval Europe from a comparative perspective. His regional research focuses on the British Isles in the Middle Ages and the late medieval empire (especially its "constitutional development"). In addition to military history, he is particularly concerned with the theory and methodology of historical cultural studies.
Ute Verstegen (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) represents the discipline of Christian archaeology and art history and works in a broad perspective on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Europe, Byzantium and the Orient. Her fields of work include in particular the religious architecture and visual culture of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages as well as studies on transcultural processes (hybridisation processes in visual culture, religiously motivated attitudes towards the image, artefact biographies, multi-religious use of space). She also has many years of experience in the conception and implementation of Visual Digital Humanities projects and the use of digital methods in university teaching.