Cornel Zwierlein receives Heisenberg scholarship from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)

The current Fellow of the Max Weber Center for Cultural and Social Studies of the University of Erfurt, Prof. Dr. Cornel Zwierlein, has received a Heisenberg scholarship for his research project "Close Distance. A knowledge history of European merchant colonies in the Levant, 17.-19. Century". The Heisenberg program is granted to scientists who already fulfill all the prerequisites to be appointed to a permanent professorship, in order to carry out their top-class projects.

Merchant colonies of pre-modern trading empires were not only the central network nodal points for economic import and export flows of goods and values, they were also cultural and epistemic units of their own kind. In the last decades the research concerning large parts of the Levant trade and local (west) European actors has been neglected.  This includes their characteristic, epistemic and cultural functions, communication and representative performance. Based on this observation the project seeks, from a historical perspective, to contribute to fundamental research for the actors, especially English, French, and the comparative outlook for the Italian and Dutch merchant colonies in the Levant from the 17th to the early 19th century in this respect.

The project, which Zwierlein is working on at the Max Weber Kolleg, closely follows this project. He works on early forms of religious studies, which were embedded in the exchange of the network of Mediterranean consuls and merchant colonies of France, England and the missionaries and societies of Europe such as the Royal Society and the Académie des sciences. In particular, for the preparatory smaller case study, he focuses on an important Greek orthodoxy and Eastern Church researcher in France around 1700, Eusèbe Renaudot, who also supported English Catholics as a spy and, succeeding his grandfather, publisher of France's oldest national newspaper, the Gazette de France was.

"We are happy about the success of  Prof. Dr.  Zwierlein in the recruitment of this prestigious scholarship of the German Research Foundation (DFG), which will enable him to profile for his further scientific career. We wish him all the best for his work following his research stay at the Max Weber Kollege, which fortunately will continue until March 2018, "said Professor Hartmut Rosa, the director of the Max Weber Kolleg.