Security in times of crisis and spiritual intermedialityFunding for 2 University of Hamburg research groups from the German Research Foundation

Photo: Vincent Leifer; IFSH

Prof. Dr. Johann Anselm Steiger and Prof. Dr. Ursula Schröder made a good impression with their research groups in the current German Research Foundation funding round.

Security is a key commitment and essential value of democratic states, but in times of multiple, global crises it is increasingly at risk. At the same time, old certainties about Europe’s peace and security in the face of ongoing war in Ukraine, the rapid rise of authoritarian forces, and increasingly dire ecological crises are beginning to crumble.

The Promise of Security in Catastrophic Times (Promise), an interdisciplinary research group that will look at this issue, is one of 4 new research groups being funded by the German Research Foundation. In the first funding phase (2026–2030), researchers will look at how democratic governments and societies in Europe struggle to identify the priorities and limits of protection. In 8 subprojects, researchers will focus on changes in security pledges and protection practices, ranging from state-based catastrophe protection and international humanitarian help to the self-organized protection of marginalized groups and the rejection of democratic security guarantees coming from the right.

“One of the goals of Promise is to gain new insight into how protection and security can be designed in the future, and how we as a society must organize ourselves to do so,” said Prof Dr. Ursula Schröder. The professor of political science with a focus on peace research and security policy at the University of Hamburg and academic director of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH) is the spokesperson for the new research group set to receive around €4.5 million in funding from the German Research Foundation.

The interdisciplinary alliance will include researchers from the University of Hamburg, the IFSH, and the Helmut Schmidt University—University of the Federal Armed Forces. “Thanks to a tight network of institutions, Hamburg is one of the most important places for social science research on security and peace in Germany,” Schröder said. The participating institutions, she continued, are part of the scientific cooperation network PIER PLUS, which strengthens cooperation and networking between Hamburg’s universities and independent research institutions. “Promise will further establish Hamburg as a leading center of research on current security issues,” said Schröder.

Funding extended for research group Spiritual Intermediality in the Early Modern Period

Interdisciplinary cooperation forms the core of the research group Spiritual Intermediality in the Early Modern Period. It is one of 11 groups to have its German Research Funding extended for a second phase. The researchers will look at the imagery and distribution of religious content, practices, and intentions from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries from the perspectives of literary study, historical musicology, art history, Ethiopian studies, Judaic studies, and Protestant and Catholic theology.

“With this integrative approach, we can precisely describe phenomena of early modern intermediality and their heterogeneous and polymorphic spiritual forms of expression,” said Prof. Dr. Johann Anselm Steiger, professor of the history of Christianity and historical theology at the University of Hamburg and the group’s spokesperson. In the second funding phase from 2026 to 2030, researchers will focus especially on the eighteenth century; bodily relations; the scaling of intensity of intermediality; and the proliferation of types of reception produced by intermediality. The researchers are set to receive around €4.5 million.