Since October 2012 Martin van Gelderen is professor for European Intellectual History at the University of Göttingen. He was assistant professor at the TU Berlin (1989-1994) and Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex (1995-2003). In 2003 he returned to his alma mater, the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, where he had obtained his PhD in 1988. Between 2003 and 2012 he was Professor of European Intellectual history at the EUI.
During the last three decades the combination of academic management and research has been characteristic for his career. He was Director of the Graduate Research Center in the Humanities at Sussex, Dean of Graduate Studies at the EUI (from 2008 until 2012) and director of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
In terms of scholarship the emphasis has been on the history of political and religious thought, in particular on European traditions of republicanism and on debates on religious toleration. He has been working on a new scholarly edition of the diaries of Anne Frank since 2013. The Dutch editio princeps and a number of translations are forthcoming. Research plans for the years to come include a new English edition and translation of Hugo Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis/The Laws of War and Peace for the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought and the monograph Between Erasmus and Rembrandt: Visual and Textual Debates on Republican Politics.
Team
Institute Director
Selected Recent Publications
Geschäftsführung
Nach dem Studium der Germanistik, Ethnologie und Romanistik in Göttingen und der Promotion als Stipendiatin der Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung an der FU Berlin, arbeitete ich von 2012 bis zu seiner Schließung 2021 am Lichtenberg-Kolleg, dem Institute for Advanced Study der Universität Göttingen.
Mit Eröffnung des Moritz-Stern-Instituts der Philosophischen Fakultät habe ich dort die stellvertretende geschäftsführende Leitung übernommen. Neben der Betreuung der am Institut arbeitenden Gastwissenschaftler*innen koordiniere ich die Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Abteilungen und Institutionen der Universität und arbeite administrativ.
Selected Recent Publications
Service and Support for International Researchers
Researchers
An historian by training, my main research interests lie in early modern and Enlightenment political thought and intellectual history. My research, thus far, has focused on two fields of study, the first of which concerns the history of Scandinavian and European monarchies in the early modern period. What particularly interests me in this context are the changing perceptions amongst monarchists and republicans alike of the nature and scope of monarchical power, not least in relation with questions about freedom. What how they were justified and repudiated by monarchists and republicans. My second field of research concerns the intellectual history of the Enlightenment in Scandinavia, focusing especially on the moral, religious, and political thought of the Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg, one of the pioneering figures of the early northern Enlightenment.
As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Moritz Stern Institute, University of Göttingen, I will be researching a project entitled “REFORMARCHY: The Reforming Spirit in the Age of Revolutions: The Counts of Bernstorff, Commercial Monarchy, and the Invention of Modern Liberty”. A study of enlightened reform in eighteenth-century Denmark, the project focuses on two reform-minded Hanoverian counts, who served as chief ministers to the Danish monarchy, that is, Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff (1712-1772) and his nephew Andreas Peter von Bernstorff (1735-1797). Through a detailed study of the personal, professional, and intellectual networks of the Counts of Bernstorff, the project reconstructs a series of entanglements and exchanges between Copenhagen, Geneva, and Göttingen in the eighteenth century. In so doing, the project aims to elucidate the economic and political ideas that shaped the reform programme of the Bernstorffs and their European connections, and to recover their main contribution to Enlightenment thought, that is, their vision of modern liberty in a commercial monarchy.
Iryna Mykhailova is a historian of Renaissance philosophy. Her research focuses on the Italian Renaissance and its historiography, with particular attention to the reception of Renaissance thought in Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently working on a monograph, The Italian Renaissance in the Soviet Union: Historiography and Cultural Reception, 1920s–1980s, and preparing an edited volume, Historiographies Lost and Reclaimed: Scholarship on the Italian Renaissance in Central and Eastern Europe, both under contract with Brill.
She has held several international fellowships, including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Harvard University), a Fulbright Fellowship (SUNY Albany), and the Moritz Stern Fellowship in Modern Jewish Studies at the Lichtenberg Kolleg, University of Göttingen. Her current research is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Dr. Mykhailova’s current project examines a group of neglected twentieth-century German philosophers who were marginalized for racial and/or political reasons in the 1930s and have since received limited attention in contemporary scholarship. The study focuses on exile thinkers such as Erich Frank (1884–1949), Helmut Kuhn (1899–1991), and Gotthard Günther (1900–1984). It aims to (a) reconstruct their intellectual biographies and philosophical contributions; (b) analyze their academic networks across Europe and the United States; and (c) reassess the significance of their work within the history of philosophy. Drawing on both published writings and largely unexplored archival materials across Europe and the United States, the project seeks to reintroduce overlooked texts into contemporary philosophical debates, thereby contributing to a diversification of the philosophical canon and a more nuanced understanding of exile.
Selected Recent Publications
Prof. Dr. Martin van Gelderen
Dr. Kora Baumbach
Silke Frischmuth
Dr. Brian Kjær Olesen
Dr. Iryna Mykhailova
Former guest researchers