Dr. Benjamin Pietrenka

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter

Theologische Fakultät
Karlstraße 2
69117 Heidelberg

T: +49 (0)6221-54 3399
E-mail: benjamin.pietrenka@ts.uni-heidelberg.de

BENJAMIN M. PIETRENKA is currently a postdoctoral lecturer at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. His research focuses on the entangled cultural histories of religion, gender, race, and empire in early America and the Atlantic World. He is particularly interested in German influences on the history of British North America and in non-traditional sites of social power and intellectual authority exercised by marginalized and common people in the early modern period.

Benjamin completed his graduate training (MA, PhD) in early American history at the University of California Santa Cruz, with a secondary teaching field in cultural anthropology. His research has been generously funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the United States Fulbright Commission, the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), the German Historical Institute (GHI), the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), and the Institute for Humanities Research (IHR), among others.

His recently published book, Religion on the Margins: Embodied Moravian Pieties on the Edges of Atlantic World Empire (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024), examines the believers and lay missionaries of the eighteenth-century Moravian Church, a radical group of German Pietists who sought to build a cosmopolitan community centered on an eschatological global vision while navigating diverse cultures, unfamiliar power structures, and the institution of slavery. He is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled Languages of Faith: Translating Scripture in Protestant Early America, which explores the history of German and English Protestant cultures of translation and how revisionings of the Bible functioned as engines of community formation in British North America.