Fellowship News: New Halbers and Baumgardt Fellows

LBI recently awarded three new fellowships for PhD candidates: two Fritz Halbers fellowships for research on German-Jewish history and culture, and one David Baumgardt Fellowship for research on David Baumgardt’s writings or scholarly interests, including ethics, Wissenschaft des Judentums, and the modern intellectual history of German-speaking Jewry.

Manuel Clancett is a PhD student at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany and a 2023 Erasmus-Scholarship holder. He received a Halbers Fellowship for his project, “[…] translated into German by illiterates” – Ludwig Marcuse’s struggle for Nietzsche in Exile. Clancett will investigate Marcuse’s intellectual legacy in the US with a particular focus on the Berlin-born philosopher’s Nietzsche reception and his advocacy for Nietzsche among his fellow émigrés and the wider Jewish community in Los Angeles. Clancett will conduct research at the University of Southern California, specifi cally the Special Collection of the Lion Feuchtwanger Memorial Library that holds Marcuse’s estate.

Paul Feller is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Musicology and Presidential Fellow at Northwestern University. His project, Jewish Musicianship at the Braunschweig Trade Fairs and Cross-Cultural Musical Exchanges in Early-Modern Lower Saxony, examines the musical practices surrounding the early-modern Jewish communities of Lower Saxony, unveiling their position within trans-European networks of cultural mobility. His objective is to investigate Jewish musicians’ role in fostering cross-cultural musical exchanges during the Braunschweig tradefairs and the challenges they encountered. As a Fritz Halbers fellow, Feller will conduct archival research at the Niedersächsische Landesarchiv in Hannover.

Ezra Engelsberg is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam & Germany Institute Amsterdam. His project, Jewish Antiquity on the German Stage: Dramatized Histories of the Hasmoneans and the Formation and Representation of Jewish Identity, 1850–1870, examines the identities of Jewish authors of German-language drama. Engelsberg plans to work with the papers of Leopold Stein and the Kempner Family Collection in the LBI Archives. “Owing to the relative obscurity of the authors and the destruction of their world in the twentieth century, source material is rare,” says Engelsberg. He hopes especially that the Kempner family collection will shed light on the cultural and familial context of the little-known poet Friederike Kempner, who lived in the Duchy of Posen.

From LBI News No. 117