| PhD Fellow | |
| Home institution: | Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee |
| Time at IEG: | 2026, 2027 |
| Funding: | IEG Fellowship |
| Research topic: | From Neighbor to Nation: Parish, Abstract Communities, and Ethics in Sixteenth-Century Germany |
| "My project uses the open-ended notion of “neighbor-love” (Nächstenliebe) as a lens for studying the scopes of moral obligation and belonging in early sixteenth-century German popular media (vernacular print and sermons). I highlight how abstract categories of belonging were articulated as part of the preaching of Christian ethics. I begin by documenting the polemics revolving around locality in the Indulgence Controversy (1515-1519): the indulgence campaigns claiming that Christians have a duty towards remote neighbors, and Luther’s pamphlets describing one’s neighbor as strictly “in one’s parish at home.” I then compare the prevalence of the local scope of moral obligation with other geographic scopes – regional, “national,” imperial, Christendom-wide – in the writings of a collection of German theologians during the following two decades. I begin this by building a database of such references using a large language model-assisted framework, I then perform quantitative analyses to compare these geographic scopes and analyze how new theological meanings of concepts such as “the nation” emerge within these writings." |
(c) Dan Matei Epure
