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Dr Almuth Ebke is Joint Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies and the German Historical Institute London for 2024-25.听
Almuth Ebke is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in modern history at the University of Mannheim. After studying at the Universities of T眉bingen, Aix-en-Provence听and Cambridge, she worked as a research associate and lecturer at the universities of Kassel and Mannheim. Almuth received her PhD听in 2018 with a dissertation that analysed the debates about belonging in academia, politics听and the public sphere that have been subsumed under term 鈥楤ritishness鈥� since the late 1960s. Addressing issues of race, class and the boundaries of belonging (and how they were simultaneously delineated by sociological research and political imperatives), the thesis examined how demographic changes were culturally interpreted and how the categories used to denote belonging informed political debates (published as , De听Gruyter-Oldenbourg: Berlin 2019). Since then, she has been a lecturer at the University of Mannheim and听working on her second book project which explores the theological roots of the concept of 鈥榤odernity鈥�.
Book project: God and the World. Higher criticism and the concept of modernity, c1830-1920
As a research fellow at the IAS, Almuth鈥檚 research will focus on her second book project, which examines the transnational debate on higher criticism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The project reads the controversy over the historicity of the Bible as a dispute over the position of the churches in the 鈥榳orld鈥� and their attitude to it: behind some of the individual attitudes to exegesis lay very different conceptions of historical development, (salvation) history and the future, which were reflected in interpretations of the world and ideas of temporality. Three aspects were central: theologically, the focus was on the justification of religious authority. Institutionally, the focus was on the repositioning of the churches, particularly in Western European countries, in the face of growing state influence. Culturally, the focus was on the churches' self-image as a point of orientation in a changing world.
This debate was fundamental to the social scientific and theological discourse of modernity that emerged at the end of the 19th century. By analysing this interdisciplinary, transnational and transdenominational debate, the project thus aims to explore the theological roots of the concept of 'modernity' and thus contribute to the historicisation of this meta-concept in the humanities and social sciences.
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