Gastgeber:innen und Gäste 2026

Tim Hertogh, Johanna Jebe, Melissa Kapitan und Rosamond McKitterick zu Gast bei Moritz Niens und Bastiaan Waagmeester (März 2026)

Moritz Niens, Bastiaan Waagmeester, Tim Hertogh, Johanna Jebe, Melissa Kapitan, Rosamond McKitterick
(© Privat, Privat, Privat, Privat, Olaf Christensen, Werner Maleczek)

From 23-28 March, Moritz Niens and Bastiaan Waagmeester are organising a project week at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut under the moniker Zeitlos aktuell. Die Vermittlung und Veränderung antiker Wissensbestände in mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. They have invited a small group of international experts for early medieval written culture to explore the common ground between their research projects, which primarily concern the study of manuscripts as historical artefacts and sources of knowledge.
Throughout the week, they plan to refine their methodological approaches through the discussion of new (theoretical) developments in the field, such as the use of handwritten text recognition, and to the test approaches by jointly examining medieval manuscripts at the Berlin State Library. The week will conclude with a colloquium on 27 March there, where the participants will present and discuss their findings.

Organisers:
Moritz Niens is a doctoral candidate and part of the chair for late antique and early medieval history at the Freie Universität Berlin. His dissertation is on the composition and transmission of the ecclesiastical history written by Cassiodorus and Epiphanius and its remarkable reuse during the Carolingian period centuries later.

Bastiaan Waagmeester is a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin and part of the chair for late antique and early medieval history. His current project investigates the role of religious education in Christian identity formation using numerous expositions of the Lord's Prayer written by both patristic and anonymous authors.

Guests:
Tim Hertogh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oslo and part of the Minitexts-Project. He is completing his dissertation on charms and incantations written in the margins of early medieval manuscripts.

Johanna Jebe is a postdoctoral researcher at the medieval history seminar at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. She is interested in the development of early medieval monasticism, the study of manuscripts and, specifically, the potential of library lists to investigate how monks perceived themselves and their communities.

Melissa Kapitan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Minitexts-Project at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include Christian liturgy and the history of monasticism, which she explored in her PhD thesis that is concerned with understanding embodied spirituality in Carolingian monasticism through its sensory history.

Rosamond McKitterick is professor emerita of medieval history at Cambridge University and a leading expert in the field of early medieval manuscript research. She is
currently investigating whether knowledge and use of the past shaped political identities during the early Middle Ages. She is particularly interested in Rome, Italy, and the Franks.

Florian Krückel zu Gast bei Daniel Austerfield (Juli 2026)

Daniel Austerfield, Florian Krückel
(© alle Privat)

New Educational Philosophy for Generative AI
In the rush to embed generative AI into classrooms, researchers, policy makers and practitioners have largely confined “AI‑literacy” to a set of narrowly defined competencies focused on efficiency and tool use. Yet, this functional framing leaves out the deeper educational questions of agency, critical reflection, and the relationship between learners and AI artefacts.
To address this gap, we are developing a philosophically grounded taxonomy that extends beyond competence‑models to capture the full spectrum of pedagogic dynamics involved in interacting with generative AI by re‑orienting the discourse on AI literacy toward genuine educational values (Bildung). The project will first produce a foundational essay that articulates this new perspective with the key objectives being (1) critique of the prevailing competency‑centric narratives that reduce AI literacy to economic outcomes and (2) construction of a robust, philosophically informed category system that introduces Bildung into this the currently narrowing framework of AI literacy.

Organiser:
Daniel Austerfield is a lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focusses on the pedagogy of teaching philosophy in light of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Jacques Lacan. Within this framework, his research branches out into other areas of interest, most prominently AI literacy and Bildung.

Guest:
Florian Krückel is an Academic Councilor at the Chair of Philosophy of education at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. His research focuses on the theory of education, with particular consideration of postmodern media and philosophy of technology. These research approaches are framed by anthropological reflections from a digital perspective.

Erica Baffelli zu Gast bei Frederik Schröer (Juli 2026)

Frederik Schröer, Erica Baffelli
(© alle Privat)

The project “Feeling with the Trouble: Affective Entanglements in and Beyond the Human” represents an interdisciplinary engagement with so-called “negative” emotions in the interlocking crises affecting human and more-than-human lives past and present. Emotions like anxiety, fear, grief, or anger are central to the experience of events such as pandemics, wars, fascism, and ecological disasters in the Anthropocene era. Simultaneously, they are shaped by history as much as they impact it in turn. We take up Donna Haraway’s urge for “Staying with the Trouble” to engage with the complexity (and messiness) of (negatively-coded) emotions, exploring their centrality to the entanglements and interrelations between humans and the more-than-human.

Our collaboration within the framework of the Dahlem Junior Host Program includes hosting Erica Baffelli at the Freie Universität Berlin (Department of Global History) from July 1-9, deepening our interdisciplinary collaboration, and strengthening Freie Universität as a central node in the international Fear Research Network (FeRN). A one-day workshop on July 3rd will serve as a platform to discuss a programmatic research article co-authored with Jane Caple and Zhaokun Xin, with invited participants from multiple European universities.

Frederik Schröer is a postdoctoral researcher in Global History at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute, Freie Universität Berlin (Chair of Prof. Dr. Sebastian Conrad). His research focuses on 19^th- and 20^th-century South Asia, global Buddhism, emotions, concepts, the environment, and the more-than-human. Following his PhD on the history of emotions in the early Tibetan diaspora, his current work traces human-environment relations among Buddhist and other religious reformers in late colonial India. He is editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Contributions to the History of Concepts (Berghahn).

Erica Baffelli is Professor of Japanese Studies at The University of Manchester (UK). She is interested in religion in contemporary Japan, with a focus on groups founded from the 1970s onwards. Her research projects and publications focus on religion in contemporary Japan; religion and media; new and minority religions; religion, gender, and violence; and Buddhism and emotions. She is currently PI on a Leverhulme Research Project on "Fear and Belonging in Minority Buddhist Communities" (2023-2027). She is co-editor, with Michael Stausberg and Alexander Van Der Haven, of the open-access publication Religious Minorities Online (De Gruyter Brill).

Workshop Participants

Maria Elena Bedoya (independent)

Jane Caple (University of Manchester)

Danilo D’Arpino (University of Manchester)

Alice Dehon (University of Manchester)

Linda Zampol D’Ortia (Ca’ Foscari University Venice)

Farha Noor (Freie Universität Berlin)

Zhaokun Xin (University of Manchester)

Elsa Kugelberg und Henrik Kugelberg zu Gast bei Luise Müller (September 2026)

Equality and the Digital Private Sphere
The question of what it means to lead a good life in the digital private sphere seems urgent, and especially so in the face of the social pathologies that are connected to digital technologies, like manipulation, bullying, scams, stalking, or doxxing. Through normative philosophical analysis, we want to work out what the good life can look like in the context of the digital private sphere. We aim to focus our analysis on mainly two aspects: first, which values are at stake in the digital private sphere, and what changes with the fact that our private sphere becomes increasingly digitalised? Second, we explore whether a social egalitarian paradigm – broadly, that social relations are good for us individually and collectively when they are egalitarian – is useful for understanding the challenges of leading a good life in the digital private sphere. Can the social ideal of equality offer a normatively attractive vision of the good life in the digital private sphere?

Elsa Kugelberg is a political theorist at the University of Oxford. She specialises in normative political theory and normative ethics. In particular, Elsa studies what it means for the state and major institutions to exercise power over individuals, how that power can be justified to us, and what we owe to each other. She is a member of Oxford Center for the Study of Social Justice and affiliated with the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Australian National University, and the Ethical Dating Online research network.

Henrik Kugelberg is an assistant professor of moral and political philosophy at the University of Warwick, an associate member of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford, and a research affiliate at the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Australian National University. Henrik‘s work focuses on the political philosophy of artificial intelligence and the digital public sphere.

Luise Müller is a lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. In her research, she focuses on normative philosophy of AI, and in particular, how egalitarian ideals can inform how we shape digital technologies. She teaches mainly in moral and political philosophy, and has previously written on the idea of political authority, international criminal justice, human rights and animal ethics.

Federico E. López, Camila Joselevich Aguilar und Tatiana Staroselsky zu Gast bei Stephanie Graf (Oktober 2026)

Stephanie Graf, Camila Joselevich Aguilar, Tatiana Staroselsky, Federico E. López
(© Jenny Elizabeth Hernández, Privat, Privat, Privat)

Heretical Argumentation
In November 2024, my colleagues Tatiana Staroselsky, Féderico López and I carried out an interdisciplinary, international and bilingual workshop. Under the name 1. Coloquio de Argumentación y Filosofía: Argumentación Herética / 1. Colloquium on Argumentation and Philosophy: Heretical Argumentation, we reflected on certain argumentative practices which are situated at the margins of what is commonly understood by eminently argumentative and rational practices. According to the dominant conceptions of argumentation, an argument supposes always one, more or less general or established, concept which grounds the path of reasoning and the conclusions.
Following an intuition we had, we named the counter-practices which stood in the center of our discussion heretical ones. Heretical practices are practices constituted in the shadow of an orthodoxy: therefore, they can be seen as ways of questioning the general principles established in a certain context. Our research and interdisciplinary discussion led us to regard these practices in continuity and/or structural analogy of religious heretical practices which have strived for legitimation using different argumentative strategies. The study of these different strategies during the history of philosophy opens up the possibility of exploring certain continuities and breaks giving way to fruitful insights both for argumentation theory as well as for the exploration of religious practices. Moreover, in the first colloquium in La Plata, we could observe a powerful display of how the heretical dimension of these argumentative practices is not simply reduced to what we can provisionally denote as the content of the argument, but also to its forms and styles. Last but not least it has to be mentioned that some of the strategies that we analyzed, recently could appear to have lost their dissident dimension because right-wing authoritarianism might have made use of these heretical forms of argument to reinforce conservative positions that in the past have strongly been criticized in the public sphere. Our focus on the “heretical” wants to open up the possibility to discuss these practices as both problematic because of their “irrationality” as well as harboring potentials critical to established structures of thought and argument.
This second edition of the “Heretical Argumentation Workshop” aims to consolidate the already existing collaboration between the scholars participating in 2024. We are happy to welcome Camila Joselevich, editor of Heresiologies. Theological-Political Narratives on Dissidence in Historyfrom Mexico (UNAM) in our organizational team. It will be an ideal occasion to launch the ongoing publication of our book, a compilation of the most important conference papers that are at the moment being re-worked into book chapters which will be published in spring 2026 by the publisher of the FaHCE UNLP

Stephanie Graf is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the Scientific Study of Religions at the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied International Development, Latin American Studies and Philosophy in Vienna, Mexico City and Jerusalem and holds a PhD in Political and Moral Philosophy. Having written a monography on Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamins Inverse Theology (Como el papel secante con la tinta, Gedisa 2022), she is especially interested in the transfer between theological and philosophical realms of thought. Her current research focuses on Critical Theory and Aesthetics, Political Theology, German-Jewish thought, antisemitism and religion and coloniality.

Camila Joselevich Aguilar holds a Ph.D. in History, a M.A. in History, and a B.A. in Classical Studies from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico). She is a professor in the Intercultural Development and Management program at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM, and has been a member of the Mexican Society for the Study of Religions (SMER) since 2014. Her research focuses on the relations between religion, discourse, and power, both in Antiquity and in contemporary societies, specialized on the construction of dissent and heresy in early Christianity, specifically the literature between Paul of Tarsus and the heresiologists of the 2nd century. She coordinated the Research Projects (PIFFyL-UNAM) “Heresiologies: Theological-Political Narratives on Dissent in the West” (2019-2023) and “Early Christianity and Political Theology: Interdisciplinary Studies” (2012-2019). She has published nationally and internationally (Mexico, Colombia, Spain) on the early Christian rhetoric of power and heresiology, both in antiquity and in the contemporary Latin American context.

Federico E. López holds a PhD in Philosophy from the National University of La Plata (Buenos Aires, Argentina), where he works as a full-time research professor. He teaches classes on the theory of argumentation and epistemology and directs a research project on the challenges posed by new argumentation technologies for the practice of giving, asking for, and examining reasons. He has edited several collective volumes on current topics in epistemology from the pragmatist tradition (Regreso a la experiencia, 2014, in collaboration with Cristina Di Gregori; Conocimiento, Arte, y Valoración, 2016, in collaboration with Victoria Sánchez and Daniel Busdygan; Contagios y contiendas, 2021, in collaboration with Cristina Di Gregori)

Tatiana Staroselsky teaches Contemporary Philosophy and Logic at the National University of La Plata (Argentina) and is a researcher at the Center for Research in Philosophy (CIeFi) at the same University. She holds a PhD in Philosophy, has been a doctoral and postdoctoral fellow of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and has conducted research stays at Humboldt University in Berlin and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with scholarships from the German Academic Exchange Service and the Macro Network. Her work has focused on the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and the problem of aestheticization, and traces, currently, the possibilities of an audiovisual turn in philosophy and the potential of the video essayism.

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