Ny professor i religionshistoria med inriktning mot samtida religion: Esther-Maria Guggenmos

HT-fakulteterna vill meddela att vi har en ny professor på väg in till HT-fakulteterna. Esther-Maria presenterar sig så här:

Esther-Maria Guggenmos will take up the position of Professor of the History of Religions with Specialisation in Contemporary Religion in April 2022. She received her education in Religious Studies and Sinology at the University of Münster, Germany. While studying in Taiwan, she was fascinated by Chinese Buddhist life and went for an ethnographic description of a Taiwanese Buddhist monastery. She immersed herself in researching Engaged Buddhism and its social and cultural projects such as the Museum of World Religions. It is from then on that the aesthetics of religion became an essential approach for her understanding of religious life – beyond and with its doctrinal and textual expressions. As an FWO fellow, Esther-Maria pursued her Ph.D. at Ghent University analysing the motivation of lay Buddhists to denote themselves as Buddhist in an urban context. In 2009, she came to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where a unique research center, the IKGF, had just started inquiring how Asian and European cultures conceptualise the future and by which means of prognostication they deal and dealt with it. Is there a substantial difference in ways of decision-making between contemporary cultures and ancient China for example? Does divination play a distinct role in Asia and could this help us to redescribe decision-making processes in Europe and Asia beyond established, but biased approaches? Specialising in Buddhism, Esther-Maria worked in her habilitation on its relation with divination and described how Chinese Buddhism naturally integrates divinatory techniques that were and are ubiquitary in Chinese society. She is currently going deeper into the question of how in contemporary Chinese Buddhist practices, rituals and ritually cultivated patterns of emotion are impacted by global interconnectedness, digitalisation, and capitalisation. Esther-Maria is looking forward to establishing joint projects in the field of the aesthetics of religion and decision-making processes.

Trevlig helg,

Johannes

mars 4, 2022

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