06/2023 Essay Prize „Traduire et diffuser“ of the German Historical Institute in Paris for the PhD thesis
since 04/2023 Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of History of the University Bielefeld
2018–2023 Research Assistant at the Chair for Late Medieval and Early Modern History of the University Duisburg-Essen
09/2021 PhD in Medieval History. Thesis: „Political Advisors and the Plans for the Recovery of the Holy Land in the Later Middle Ages“, supervised by Benjamin Scheller (Duisburg-Essen) and Frank Rexroth (Göttingen)
2017 J.B. Harley Research Fellowship in the History of Cartography
2015–2018 Research Associate at the Research Training Group „Expert Cultures from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century“ of the Georg-August University Göttingen
2014 Master of Arts in History and Philosophy at the University Duisburg-Essen
Publications
Books
Articles (peer-reviewed)
Books chapters
Review articles in „Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters“, „H-Soz-Kult“, „Médiévales“ and „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken“.
Research Projects
Religious Charismatics and Social Change (9th to 12th Centuries)
The question of the relationship between continuity and social change has long fascinated medievalists. In particular, the (supposed) emergence of a feudal society after the final collapse of the Carolingian Empire has been controversially discussed in the past under the generic term 'mutation de l'an mil' or 'feudal revolution'. This project seeks to reopen the debate from the perspective of the sociology of religion, using hagiographic sources. It focuses on religious charismatics, such as saints, visionaries or magicians, to whom contemporaries attributed supernatural gifts. As these personalities responded directly to their contemporaries' need for orientation and order (i.e. theodicy and sociodicy), they provide an ideal medium for observing processes of social change such as the feudal transformation. The impact of these charismatics will be analysed on the basis of hagiographical sources such as miracle collections and visionary reports from the late Carolingian period to the 12th century. Because of their formal constancy, these texts are much better suited to cross-regional and diachronic comparisons of structural change than the administrative sources that have dominated the debate to date. The sources will be analysed using both case studies of individual charismatics and quantitative content analysis. The focus will be on the social guiding differences that the charismatics observed, commented on, created or attempted to overturn.
The Production of Crusade Experts at the Royal Courts of the Late 13th and Early 14th Centuries (completed)
In 1291, the Egyptian Sultan conquered the last crusader strongpoints left in the Levant. Western rulers, however, refused to accept the loss of their Holy Land and immediately began planning a new crusade. In the wake of utter defeat, they started to question existing knowledge and tried to find new ways and means to conduct a crusade. This epistemic crisis of crusading knowledge became the focus of numerous expert advisors who tried to use their expertise to devise sometimes risky, sometimes conservative recovery projects. The project aims to examine the activities of these advisors from the perspective of the history of knowledge by analysing how crusading knowledge was generated, translated and evaluated at Western courts. It combines hermeneutic approaches with quantitative methods from the fields of content analysis and social network analysis.