Projects

If the connection between the European exploration of Africa and colonialism seems unequivocal in retrospect, it may be surprising that in the 1860s, African travelers, scholars, and politicians…

The history of the Justus Perthes Gotha publishing house was particularly shaped by various upheavals and the tensions of political system rivalries, especially in the 20th century. The location of…

Africanist linguistics is closely connected to missionary and colonial claims to authority over the political upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. In my work, I therefore inquire into the…

The project examines the influence of cartography on German-language Japanology in the late 19th century. So far, the historical development of German-language Japanology has been interpreted with a…

With the first assembly of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians in 1822, according to Werner von Siemens (1886), a 'scientific age' began, in which the natural sciences opened up to…

Living elephants, giraffes, ostriches, and camels, baboons, and donkeys unknown in Europe – the list of animals traded globally in the 19th century was extensive. Besides the numerous animals, various…

Bifurcated cartographies (BC) seeks to shed light into this process from a map-making cross continental reading. It examines the representation of Guatemala, and Central America, from a foreign and a…

The examination of the often neglected ecological dimension of decolonization contributes to a better understanding of the impacts of historical transformations on the natural environment.…

Collecting is undoubtedly one of the oldest cultural techniques, and it constitutes a fundamental practice in various forms in contemporary cultures as well. What is collected ranges between the poles…

The research project focuses on journeys from Europe to Northeast Africa before colonial land appropriation. It examines natural-scientific-geographical and political spatial knowledge based on…

The project aims to analyze, through objects, places, institutions such as publishing houses, associations, societies, or universities, as well as individuals and other actors, how collections…

The Lutheran Duchess Luise Dorothea, born in Sachsen-Meiningen (1710-1767), had a significant impact on the court and political-cultural life in 18th century Gotha. She belongs to a group of…

The Bromacker site has been known for over 100 years and is one of the most important and productive fossil deposits for land vertebrates from the early Permian period (approx. 290 million years ago).…

The Gotha Research Library preserves over 12,000 unique print titles from the period 1601 to 1700. All of these titles are catalogued in the Register of Printed Works of the 17th century Published in…

With 145,000 objects, the Numismatic Collection is one of the largest collections at the Friedenstein. As part of the Gotha transdigital project, the numismatic objects in the Numismatic Collection…

Even before the institutional establishment of archaeological disciplines and museum presentations in the modern sense, material relics of the past were unearthed from the ground both accidentally and…

As early as 1753, in the early phase of his work, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing described religion as a particularly fruitful subject for his writing. As he explained in his early edition of his works, it…

The project uses the diaries of the Gotha guard commander and chamberlain Christian Georg von Helmolt (1728-1805) from 1783 to 1788 and the journals of the court junketer and publicist Karl Heinrich…

With the participation of researchers from Arabic studies, theology, philology and philosophy, an international working group at the Gotha Research Centre is researching the early history of Oriental…

The Thuringian poet Sidonia Hedwig Zäunemann (1711-1740) is one of the Poetae Laureati honoured by German universities for her poetry and scholarship. Under what conditions did she live and write,…

The project examines the circulation of military knowledge during the early modern period on the basis of the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, focusing on the period from 1670 to 1770, since 1.) the…

The project examines the diaries of the Frankfurt physician and founder Johann Christian Senckenberg (1707-1772), which exhibit characteristics of both the religious diary and the epistemic genre of…

The activities of Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg (1745-1804) as a prince of the Age of Enlightenment have so far mostly only been analysed with regard to his regional influence or one of…

The research project examines ceremonial as a form of communication in the 18th century using the example of the Gotha ducal court. The extensive correspondence between the dukes of Gotha and other…

The Alchemy Network, founded in December 2016, has set itself the goal of promoting exchange on the reconstruction of alchemical processes in the early modern period between historians and natural…

Das Projekt untersucht die Geschichte der Naturrechtslehre an den drei norddeutschen Universitäten in Kiel, Greifswald und Rostock im Zeitraum von 1648 bis 1806. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, warum, wie…

Michael Kosmeli (1773-1844), lawyer, writer, translator, botanist and Jew's harp player, travelled throughout his life as an itinerant scholar and musician through half of Europe to Asia, preferably…

Since 2016, the Research Centre for Early Modern Natural Law has been coordinating ongoing research on natural law in the early modern period and initiating new projects. The time frame under…

My research project brings renewed attention to a significant Chinese collection in early nineteenth-century Germany, the Chinese Cabinet in Gotha, established by Duke Emil August (1772–1822) of…

In its efforts to catalogue the Perthes Publishing House Archive, the Gotha Research Library is currently focusing on the historical archive of the Justus Perthes Publishing House up until 1945/1953.…

The main focus of the historically grown music collection at the Research Library is Thuringian music history. The collection contains writings on music theory (8,000 notes, including 1,400…

Around 1800, Gotha was a court interconnected throughout Europe. Since the founding of the duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1640), the dukes’ collecting interests gave rise to extensive collections of…

The Marie Curie Initial Training Network “Mediating Islam in the Digital Age” (MIDA) assumes that digitalisation and technological progress have a significant impact on Islam, with diverse and…

The project “Cultural Heritage in Cyberspace: Education, Preservation, Access”, which is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), aims to create a comprehensive bi-national academic…

The scholar and statesman Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff is considered one of the most important representatives of the European Republic of Letters in the early modern period. He is regarded as the…

The cooperation project involves the digitization of rare and difficult-to-access prints and manuscripts pertaining to horticulture and landscape parks in the Gotha Research Library, the Duchess Anna…

The Perthes Collection, legacy of the publishing houses Justus Perthes in Gotha, Justus Perthes in Darmstadt and VEB Hermann Haack in Gotha, is one of the most important map publishing archives in…

Based on the transmitted collection of maps and the geographical writings of the publisher, this study aims to examine the evolution of cartography under the conditions of war, as well as the…

With the Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of Poland, the eastern border of Germany underwent significant changes. Politicians and scholars from both the Second Polish Republic and the…

The Middle East has been a focal point of colonial projects and theological research since the 19th century. What conceptions regarding environment, space, and cultural history underpinned the…

An international team led by Adrian Linder, ethnologist and associated researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, investigated the provenance of a total of 41 human…

Jacopo Strada (c. 1515–1588), antiquarian, architect and antiquarian dealer, created a 30-volume corpus, the Magnum ac Novum Opus (MaNO), for his patron Johann Jakob Fugger in the mid-16th century.…

The Gotha Research Library of the University of Erfurt is participating in the digitization of the manuscript heritage in German libraries. It has digitized 247 of its 525 significant medieval…

The project “Orient Digital” is a collaborative initiative between the Berlin State Library, the Gotha Research Library, the IT department of the University Computer Centre in Leipzig and the Bavarian…

As the historical state library of the territories of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the Gotha Research Library collects the regional print production as completely as possible, makes…

The research project comprises two partner projects being carried out simultaneously in France (funded by French National Research Agency) and Germany (funded by German Research Foundation). The…

Maps, especially sea and ocean maps, have played a marginal role in the history of globalization so far, although they visualize maritime spaces along with their associated global connections like…