Hiob Ludolf Fellowships

The programme aims at promoting academic research through the use of the resources of the Gotha Research Library and of the associated historic collection of the Justus Perthes Gotha Publishing House. Its academic orientation intends to carry on the universal spirit of the library itself and its diverse resources. In this sense, the programme has an open thematic and disciplinary character. The holdings of the Thuringian State Archive of Gotha, which is located in the Perthes-Forum, as well as collections held by the museums of the Schloss Friedenstein Foundation can be included in the research project, too. Still, the following focal points are emphasized and applications should reflect the clear-cut fields of the Research Library:

• The ducal court in Gotha as an example for European court culture
• History of science and cultures of knowledge as global history, history of transfer, and entangled history, 16th to 20th century
• History of European literature, particularly 16th to early 19th century
• History of publishing and book trade
• Early Modern and 19th-century study of Classical religions, history of Protestantism, and Islam
• Philosophy and history of the German and European Enlightenment
• Heterodoxy, dissidence, and subversion
• History of the humanities, e.g. numismatics, oriental studies, philology
• History of natural science, e.g. alchemy, astronomy, physics and botany
• History of spatially oriented disciplines, 16th to 20th century, e.g. ethnology, geology, meteorology, geography and statistics
• History of cartography and colonial history (especially from an African, Asian or Latin American perspective), cartography and politics (“critical geopolitics”, history of slavery, history of the oceans)
• History of ego-documents in a global context (e.g. correspondences)
• History of objects and the historical study of material culture
• Collection and museum studies