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Rebekka Voß (PhD in Jewish Studies 2007, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf) is Professor of the History of German and European Jewry at Goethe University Frankfurt. She conducts research on early modern Jewish history, Jewish-Christian relations, Yiddish literature, cultural transfer, and messianism. As a Frankfurt Fellow, she will supervise the team’s work on entanglement.

Markus Wriedt (Dr. theol. 1990, University of Hamburg; habilitation 2004, Goethe University Frankfurt) is Professor of Church History in the Evangelical Faculty of Theology at Goethe University Frankfurt. He publishes on historical theology in later medieval and early modern times, the histories of Enlightenment and nineteenth-century theology, and the Renaissance reception of the Church fathers.

As a Frankfurt Fellow of the POLY Research Group, his work focused on the deconstruction of the confessionalisation model, dynamic relationships among evolving Christian lifestyles and their doctrinal referents, and the dynamics generated by the tension between religious differentiation and homogeneity in the gradual transformation of Christian ontologies. Within the field of symbolic communication, he is particularly interested in the performance and politics of identity within confessional cultures.

Simon Ditchfield gained his PhD from the Warburg Institute at the University of London, UK in 1991. Since then he has held a variety of positions in the Department of History at the University of York, UK. In 2014 he became Professor of History there and has been working on writing a history of the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion in the period 1500–1700 ca. For the POLY project he gave a lecture in May 2021 on Agency and Appropriation in Early Modern Roman Catholicism and in July 2022 on Rome Calling? Rewriting the Catholic Reformation for the 21st Century.

Jörg Feuchter (PhD in Medieval History 2006, Humboldt University Berlin) is the research coordinator (Arbeitsstellenleiter) for the project Regesta Imperii – Regesten Kaiser Friedrichs III. (1440–1493) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. His research on medieval religion focuses on three topics: Christian dissidence and repression, religious violence and transcultural entanglements between Islam and Christianity, and royal policy towards Jewish subjects.

Feuchter has published widely on such topics including his monograph Ketzer, Konsuln und Büßer. Die städtischen Eliten von Montauban vor dem Inquisitor Petrus Cellani 1236–1241 (2007) as well as edited volumes including Religion and Its Other: Secular and Sacral Practices in Interaction (2008) and Cultural Transfers in Dispute: Representations in Asia, Europe and the Arab World since the Middle Ages (2011). His new book project is Tötungsrecht und Tötungsverbot. Der Plan von Kaiser Friedrich III. und Markgraf Albrecht von Brandenburg zur Ausplünderung der Nürnberger Judenschaft, 1463/1464. He is also interested in premodern political rhetoric and representation as well as studying history using methods drawn from the natural sciences, especially ancient DNA-based research.

Kateryna Kovalchuk’s academic path took her from Classical Philology to the fields of Medieval and Byzantine Studies. Following her passion for the Medieval World, she undertook studies for degree programmes and conducted research in some of the world’s leading universities and research centres. She was generously supported by a number of prestigious scholarship awards (including the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office Chevening Scholarship for the University of Oxford, A. Onassis scholarship, Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Fellowship, etc).

Preceded by MA and MPhil degrees in Medieval Studies from the Central European University in Budapest, she completed her doctorate at the Catholic University of Leuven and was awarded a PhD degree in Greek and Latin languages and literatures. Her research focuses on Byzantine narratives of church and monastery foundations, hagiography, and animal sacrifice as a Chrisianized ritual.

Svitlana Potapenko (PhD in History 2010, M.S. Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archeography and Source Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department for Act Archeography of M.S. Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archeography and Source Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She explores the early modern history of Ukraine and East Central Europe with a focus on elites, social and juridical practices, and the transition of ideas. Within the POLY Research Project, she examines the literary legacy of the eighteenth-century Ukrainian ecclesiastic intellectuals and their interactions with Western academic and artistic circles.

Oksana Prokopyuk (PhD in History 2007, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine) is a Leading Research Fellow, Department of History and Archeology, National Preserve Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in Kyiv, Ukraine. She publishes widely on Church history, religious studies, social history, religious culture, history of empires of Eastern Europe, and eighteenth-century studies. Within the frame of the POLY Research Group, she examines ‘communication through donations’ in the religious culture of the Kyiv Orthodox Metropolitanate in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Klaus-Peter Todt (PhD 1989, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; habilitation 1999, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) is Professor of Byzantine Studies at Mainz University (now in retirement) working on a wide range of topics within the field of Byzantine history and theology.

For the POLY project he gave a lecture on 14th June 2022, entitled Byzantium in the 11th Century: the Stratēgikon of Kekaumenos. Byzantine literature is very often Constantinople-centred, neglecting events in the provinces (themata) of the Empire. But Kekaumenos (or Kekavmenos), an aristocrat living in Thessaly, is a great exception. In his Stratēgikon, more a summary of his experiences in life and some good advice than a manual on strategy and tactics, he mentions many cities (polis ‘city’) and fortresses (kastron ‘fortress’) in the provinces of the Empire and their respective histories, for example: Amaseia (§ 74), today Amasya/Turkey; Arabissos in Cappadocia (§ 37); Bisiniana (§ 32), today Bisignano/Italy (Calabria); Boïanos and Botkos (§ 33), fortresses in Bulgaria; Dēmētrias/Greece (Thessaly) (§ 31–32); Dyrrhachion (§ 29), today Durrës/Albania; Larisa, today Larissa/Greece (Thessaly); Philippupolis (§ 33), today Plovdiv/Bulgaria; Salōn (§ 90), ancient Salona/Dalmatia, today Solin/Croatia;  Thessalonikē (§ 27); Tobion (§ 30), today Dvin in Armenia; Triaditza (§ 33), today Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Although living in a provincial city, Kekaumenos admonished his sons to be loyal to the emperor reigning in Constantinopel and not to support rebellions against the emperor, because the emperor in his capital will always be victorious.

In his fellowship lecture (5th July 2022), Klaus-Peter Todt spoke on the topic Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem (1669–1707) and His History of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem. Patriarch Dositheus II of Jerusalem (1641–1707) was a self-made man. He never visited an academy or a university. Hence it is very remarkable that he did not only compose a higly esteemed confession of the Orthodox faith, the Confessio Dosithei (1672, revised edition 1690), but also a very extensive History of the Greek orthodox patriarchs of Jerusalem from the apostle Jacob to his own lifetime (Historia tōn en Hierosolymois patriarcheusantōn), written in a classicising Greek and published posthumously by his nephew and successor, patriarch Chrysanthos Notaras of Jerusalem (1707–1731). This history too was as detailed as it was controversial, dealing with the Roman Catholic theology of the Counter-Reformation (especially with the Controversies of cardinal Roberto Bellarmin, SJ) and the arguments in favor of the primacy of the Pope.

Dominik Fugger (PhD 2006, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) currently researches the early modern histories of ideas, religion, and scholarship. He has published widely on early modern festival culture, ritual theory, and historiography. Building upon his extensive work on the early modern scholarly perception and theorising of paganism, Fugger spent his POLY fellowship exploring the concept of polytheism: how it may be used by historians to understand identity formation within Christianity, especially within polycentric processes occurring along or across denominational boundaries.

Nelly Sturm is a professional musician who specialises in early music. She plays recorder and historical bassoon. While focusing on medieval, baroque, and classical European repertoire, she has always been fascinated by non-European musical traditions. In 2010, she completed her diploma thesis on the transmission of Armenian liturgical music. Although this tradition relied on oral transmission for centuries, Sturm’s project examined the influence of Western musical elements (such as polyphony and notation) since the nineteenth century.

Since 2011, she has attended several practical courses for Indian and Persian music, especially North Indian classical styles and modal improvisation, with Kenneth Zuckerman at the Ali Akbar College of Music in Basel. During her POLY fellowship, she was in exchange with the Greek Orthodox sisters of the monastery Dionysios Trikkis and Stagon (Germany). She is also taking lessons in Byzantine chant in order to expand her knowledge of Eastern liturgical music traditions as well as the variety of musical conceptions centering on modality and its systematization (octoechoes).

Julia Herzberg (PhD in Eastern European Cultures and Languages 2011, Bielefeld University) is Professor of Eastern and Central European History and the History of Premodern Russia at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She has published widely on the autobiographical writing of peasants in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. More recently, her research has focused on the environmental history of Central Eastern Europe and Russia. She is working on an environmental history of frost in Russia that examines the social and cultural aspects of the country’s harsh climate. She is most centrally interested in the cultural implications of bodily afflictions.

As a POLY Fellow, she worked on a book project titled Vigilance and Abstinence: Conflicts over Fasting in Early Modern Russia (Vigilanz und Verzicht. Konflikte um das Fasten im Russland der Vormoderne). This work analyses practices of abstinence in the polycentric and ethnically diverse world of early modern Russia, with an emphasis on how those practices were monitored by secular and religious authorities, medical experts, and other individual actors.

Iryna Klymenko (PhD in History 2018, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) is a postdoctoral researcher at LMU within the DFG-funded Cultures of Vigilance Collaborative Research Centre. She publishes on discursive semantics of social transformation in early modern Europe, synergies between historiographies of Western and Eastern Europe, and historical theory and method. With the POLY fellowship, she was pursuing two closely-related book projects. The first investigates the cultural histories of abstinence and fasting in the ethnically diverse and multi-confessional cities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1540–1648). The second studies early modern Jewish body practices and administrative self-regulation in multi-confessional Polish-Lithuanian cities.

Klaus Koschorke (Dr. theol. 1976, Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg; habilitation 1991, University of Bern, Switzerland) is Professor Emeritus of the Chair for Early and Global History of Christianity at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, which he developed into a centre for the study of the History of Christianity in the Non-Western World (Asia, Africa, and Latin America); since 2013, he has been teaching and researching as guest professor in the UK (Liverpool), China (Beijing, Huangzhou), Japan (Tokyo), Korea (Seoul), South Africa (Pretoria), among other places.

Inspired by several guest lectureships and research stays in India and Sri Lanka, as the convenor of the international and interdisciplinary Munich-Freising conferences, and as the director or lead investigator of various research projects, he developed with his team the concept of a polycentric history of world Christianity. As a Senior Fellow of the POLY Research Group, he is currently working on a history of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (1450–2000) and a collection of essays on the polycentricity of world Christianity.

Marco Cavarzere (PhD 2009, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy) is researcher at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. He publishes on the histories of communication and ideas, on confessional cultures as well as the Protestant Reformation, and on early modern statehood and administrative history. His research focuses on the polycentric and pluralistic nature of ecclesiastical (including papal) jurisdictions in global context.

Cecilia Cristellon (PhD in History 2005, European University Institute, Florence, Italy) is a research fellow for the Chair of Early Modern History at Goethe University Frankfurt, where she works on Architectures of Order: Practices and Discourses between Design and Knowledge, a project supported by the LOEWE excellence initiative of the German State of Hesse. Her research focuses on interreligious contacts and conflicts (including mixed marriages and rites of passage) in the Roman congregations during the early modern era, analysing ecclesiastical courts and the polycentric administration of religious difference.

Elisa Frei is an Assistant Professor at the faculty of Catholic Theology of Goethe University Frankfurt. She also works as a project assistant for the Digital Indipetae Database, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, and is a research associate at the University of York. She has written extensively on Litterae Indipetae and the Jesuit missions in the early modern period.

Ute Lotz-Heumann is the Heiko A. Oberman Professor of Late Medieval and Reformation History at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. She specialises in early modern Irish and German history and the history of the European Reformations and Enlightenment. Ute Lotz-Heumann is currently the director of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona, and the North American Managing Co-Editor of the Archive for Reformation History.

From December 2023 to August 2024, Ute Lotz-Heumann is a Guest Affiliated Researcher at the POLY Research Group.

Dr Cesare Santus works on confessional dynamics within the Eastern Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire (with a focus on the Armenians) and the role of the Roman Inquisition with respect to the doctrinal problems posed by Catholic missions in the East. He is the author of Trasgressioni necessarie. Communicatio in sacris, coesistenza e conflitti tra le comunità cristiane orientali (2019) and various articles on Eastern Christians and the Muslim presence in Italy.

Xenia von Tippelskirch (PhD 2003, European University Institute, Florence, Italy; habilitation 2019, Humboldt University Berlin) is Professor at the History Department at Goethe University Frankfurt and Director of the IFRA (SHS) / Institut français Frankfurt. Her interests are the history of bodies in religious dissent in early modern Europe, the history of mystical movements and spiritual childhood in early modern France and Germany, and the history of knowledge transfer accross denominational and political borders. In the context of POLY, she contributes to the decentralization of religious history focussing on dissenting movements.

Ivan Almes (PhD 2018), associate professor at the Department of History, director of the Ihor Skochylias Center for Religious Culture, and academic coordinator of the Kyivan Christianity Research Program at the Ukrainian Catholic University. He did internships at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder), Institute of the Eastern Churches of Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg (Germany), and Institute of Sangalli (Florence, Italy). He researches the history of reading, monasticism, and the religious history of early modern Ukraine and has authored more than 40 scholarly papers. His last book is From Prayer to Education: History of Monks’ Reading in the Lviv Eparchy of the 17th and 18th Centuries” (Lviv, 2021). He is a member of the Historical Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the Ukrainian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Oksana Prokopyuk (PhD in History 2007, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine) is a Leading Research Fellow, Department of History and Archeology, National Preserve Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in Kyiv, Ukraine. She publishes widely on Church history, religious studies, social history, religious culture, history of empires of Eastern Europe, and eighteenth-century studies. Within the frame of the POLY Research Group, she examines ‘communication through donations’ in the religious culture of the Kyiv Orthodox Metropolitanate in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Vitalii Tkachuk (PhD 2018, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine) is the Deputy Director of the Spiritual Treasures of Ukraine City Museum in Kyiv. Vitalii’s research interests focus on Eastern Europe and include the early modern visual and material culture of Eastern Christians, cults of saints, and the religious life of Greek merchants in the Hetmanate. Currently, Vitalii is researching the transmission of Northern and Western European religious prints in Kyiv, tracing their transcultural movement and thus demonstrating their place in the early modern global art network.