Gotha Research Center

The Gotha Research Centre is an internationally renowned research institute of the University of Erfurt, maintaining close ties to the Gotha Research Library. Our main objective is to conduct and facilitate international interdisciplinary research projects in the field of cultural and intellectual history of the modern period. A large part of our research is closely related to the remarkable holdings of the adjacent Research Library.

Current research projects include e.g. work on European Orientalism in the seventeenth century, natural history, history of cartography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and on the Order of the Illuminati of the Late Enlightenment.

In addition, the Research Centre offers a rich programme of (guest) lectures, conferences, and colloquia. Our goal is to serve as a platform where scholars from all over the world can conduct research and discuss their ideas and work in progress in a challenging and congenial atmosphere. The Gotha Research Centre is headed by Prof. Martin Mulsow (philosophy / early modern history of ideas) and co-director Prof. Iris Schröder (nineteenth-century global history), assisted by a board of directors and an international scientific advisory board.