Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies (RPM)
Project with Prof. Pamela Klassen, recipient of an Anneliese Maier Research Award (Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung) [mehr]
Religious and Secular Practices and Media
Visual and material mediation of religious and secular practice
Pluralism in transnational Christian belief practices
History and Anthropology of Emotions
Emotional practices of religious and political actors
Practice theory approach in the study of emotions
History of Knowledge
Anthropology during the First World War
Emotion Concepts
Plant Humanities
History of knowledge on forests and forestry
Transnational history of arboreal exchange
Research interests
In my teaching and research, I combine ethnological and historical methods in the analysis of everyday cultural phenomena in Europe during the period we refer to as 'modern' (ca. 1850 to the present). For many years, I have worked on emotions and questions around faith and conviction, whether religious or secular. As an alternative to the dominant paradigm from psychology, I have worked with an approach that comes from practice theory (see article in History and Theory, 2012) and explores how emotional practices come into play in social contexts characterized by cultural and religious pluralism (see Enthusiasm, 2020 and Secular Bodies, Affects, and Emotions, 2019). My five-year collaborative project with Prof. Pamela Klassen (University of Toronto) on religion and public memory in multicultural societies, funded by Klassen's Anneliese Maier Research Award (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), has explored the meaning of public rituals and sites of memory (see The Public Work of Christmas, 2019 and Making Promises, 2025). In 2011, I was awarded the Walter de Gruyter Prize by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities for my research on popular religious practices. These topics include shifting meanings of Black Madonnas from the 17th to the 20th century (see article in the American Historical Review 2002), Marian apparition cults in Cold War Germany (e.g. Rosenkranz und Kriegsvisionen, 2006) and the emotional practices of Protestant (evangelical and mainline) worship service (various essays 2009-2015). I have also contributed to the history of knowledge production and circulation, especially with regard to constructions of race and ethnicity in the ethnological and anthropological sciences in Europe (Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones, 2010). My new research project also deals with the history of knowledge around North American trees imported to Europe (with a focus on Württemberg) in the 19th century, both as objects in collections (aesthetic and scientific) and as economic objects (for horticulture and forestry), as well as current transformations in their meanings between conservation and invasiveness. From 2016-2020 I was Vice-Rector for International Affairs with reduced teaching duties; from 2020-2028 I have no teaching duties at the LUI during my term of office as Vice-Rector for International Affairs and Diversity.
Biography
Education
B.A., Stanford University, History, 1989
M.A., University of Tübingen, 2000
Dr. rer. soc., University of Tübingen, 2006
Academic positions
2002–2007
Research fellow (doctoral and postdoc), Collaborative Research Center (SFB 437) on War Experience, University of Tübingen
2008–2011
Research fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
2011–2014
Assistant Professor, University of Tübingen, Dept of Hist. and Cult. Anthropology
since 2014
Professor, University of Tübingen, Dept of Hist. and Cult. Anthropology
2025
Honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen
