Almuth Ebke
Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Almuth Ebke is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in modern history at the University of Mannheim and currently Joint Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies and the German Historical Institute London for 2024-25. After studying at the Universities of Tübingen, Aix-en-Provence and Cambridge, she worked as a research associate and lecturer at the universities of Kassel and Mannheim. Almuth received her PhD in 2018 with a dissertation that analyzed the debates about belonging in academia, politics and the public sphere that have been subsumed under term ‘Britishness’ 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 Britishness. Die Debatte über nationale Identität in Großbritannien, 1967 bis 2008, De Gruyter-Oldenbourg: Berlin 2019). Since then, she has been a lecturer at the University of Mannheim and working on her second book project which explores the theological roots of the concept of ‘modernity’.
Research Project
God and the World
Higher criticism and the concept of modernity, c1830-1920
As a research fellow at the IAS, Almuth’s 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 ‘world’ 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 analyzing 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 historicization of this meta-concept in the humanities and social sciences.
Research Interests
- History of religion and modernity
- Intellectual history of nations and nationalism
- British social, political and cultural history, in particular questions of internal decolonisation and national belonging
- History of Anglo-American cultural studies
Recent Publications
Monographs:
Britishness. Die Debatte über nationale Identität in Großbritannien, 1967 bis 2008 (Berlin, 2019).
„The Party is Over?“ Britische Wirtschaftspolitik und das Narrativ des „Decline“, 1970–1976 (Frankfurt a.M. u.a., 2012).
Special issues:
with Christoph Haack, Periodization and modernity, History of European Ideas (2024) (published online, print to follow).
Journal articles:
with Christoph Haack, ‘Periodization and modernity. An Introduction’, History of European Ideas (2024) (published online, print to follow).
‘Großbritannien und der Brexit. Aktuelle Forschungen und Perspektiven’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 64 (2024), 433-454.
‘Identität. Die britische Neue Linke und die politischen Wurzeln eines umstrittenen Konzepts’, Historische Zeitschrift 315 (2022), 350-384.
‘From “ethnic community” to “black community”: the cultural belonging of migrants between race relations research and the politics of blackness in 1970s and 1980s Britain’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC, Supplement 15 (2020), 93–110.
‘The decline of the mining industry and the debate about Britishness of the 1990s and early 2000s’, Contemporary British History 32/1 (2018), 121–141.
More information on the Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship