Heidelberg | Harvard
Re-thinking Nineteenth-Century American Liberal Protestant and New Religious Movements from a Global Perspective
This project re-examines the “unorthodox” strands of nineteenth-century American religion—New England-rooted liberal Protestantisms such as Unitarianism, Universalism, and their Transcendentalist offshoot, alongside emergent movements like Mormonism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and New Thought—to reveal their neglected global entanglements. It will trace how white and Black Unitarian and Universalist congregations, Mormon missionaries, Transcendentalist thinkers, and Spiritualist networks interacted with Europe (especially Germany), Asia, and other regions through personal correspondence, printed media, travel, and missionary work, demonstrating a reciprocal flow of ideas and practices that both shaped these American traditions and left lasting imprints on religious, cultural, and socio-political developments worldwide. This project will thereby produce a more nuanced, transnational history of American religious reform in the long nineteenth century and its ongoing reception.
Principal initiators:
- David Holland, John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History, Harvard Divinity School
- Günter Leypoldt, Professor of American Literature; Department of English and the HCA
- Charles Stang, Professor of Early Christian Thought, Harvard Divinity School, Director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religion
- Jan Stievermann, Professor of the History of Christianity in North America; Faculty of Theology and the HCA
Literary Culture and the Imaginative Infrastructure of the Research University
The project “Literary Culture and the Imaginative Infrastructure of the Research University” brings together literary analysis, institutional sociology, and transatlantic intellectual history to develop a new framework for understanding how universities – particularly English departments – contribute to the making of literary authority. Anchored at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), the nearly two-year collaboration will connect closely with existing initiatives, including the HCA’s DFG Research Training Group “Authority and Trust,” and will foster interdisciplinary exchange across the humanities and the social sciences.
Initiators:
- Beth Blum, Professor of English, Department of English, Harvard University
- Günter Leypoldt, Professor of American Literature, Department of English, Heidelberg University, and HCA
Universalism, Particularism and Power: The Rise and Fall of “Transatlantic Values”
HCA Director Professor Welf Werner is part of the project “Universalism, Particularism and Power: The Rise and Fall of ‘Transatlantic Values.’”