Profile

My current research concerns hydrolatry as a religious category. My aim is to define hydrolatry and its role for human religious behavior in a systematic manner based on observations in East and Southeast Asia which are meant to be slowly expanded.

In relation to hydrolatry, my research also deals with questions of material religion, colonization, decolonization, identity negotiation and nonconformism, border shifts, health, disease (including pandemics) and religious medicine.

My previous research concerned sacred space, architecture, identity and reclaiming sovereignty. In this context, I have developed a new methodological approach – the Experiential Architecture Analysis.

Geographically, I deal primarily with Vietnam, China and religions in Greater East Asia. I am especially concerned with the relationship between local religion and Buddhism, imperial cult and Buddhism, imperial cult and non-conformist religions.

I offer seminars on East Asian religious history.

I offer lectures on Buddhism.

I offer seminars on topics of social relevance in a comparison of religions, e.g. pandemics and religious concepts of medicine or religious perspectives on energy and the environment.

Occasionally, I offer courses related to questions of gender and identity. Next semester (2023) I will co-teach a course on Jewish Feminism in the Modern Era.

• Godsend Against the Pandemic

  The course treated concepts of disease, research on disease and attempts at healing from multiple perspectives. It emphasized the role of the healer and the development of the profession of medical doctors and the elitistic and misogynist issues of it (globally). A focus was on the second and third plague pandemics and their social context, with a perspective on contemporary social reactions to Covid-19.

• Three Worlds, One Country: Vietnamese Religious History

  The course presented the religious history of Vietnam as an example of the entanglements between South, East and Southeast Asian religious ideas.

  
  

• Religion and Spatiality

  This course introduced the conception of religious space in religious studies, presented relevant theories and methods for researching religious space with the appropriate problems and gave the students the opportunity to carry out a first field visit in order to put what they had learned into practice.

• Introduction to Buddhism (Summer 2023)

  This course introduces the emergence and conception of Buddhism, presents its most important representatives, rules and areas of distribution and gives an insight into the different orientations, schools and ritual practice. A focus is the spread of Buddhism and its confrontation with other (local) religions.

  
  

• Introduction to East Asian Religions (Summer 2023)

  This course offers students an introduction to the concepts of "local religion", "state cult" and an insight into the religions of China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan. The focus is on their endemic religions in confrontation with Buddhism. There is also an introduction to the social context of New and New New Religions.