New Research Training Group: How Does Enmity Arise?

"Ambivalent Enmity" is the topic of a new Research Training Group (RTG) at Heidelberg University based in the humanities and social sciences. It will focus on "Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East". The application for Research Training Group 2840, a collaboration with the Heidelberg Center for Jewish Studies, was accepted in the latest approval round of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The DFG allocates funding worth approximately 6,5 million euros for five years to this group for training early-career researchers. The spokesperson is Tanja Penter from Ruperto Carola's Department of History. "Instead of understanding enmity as a necessary evil or the essence of all politics, we emphasise its transcultural, processual and ambivalent dimension. In our Research Training Group, we want to train a new generation of scholars equipped to capture such ambivalences in the genealogy, performance, and practice of enmity - both, in the past as well as the present," underlines Tanja Penter, whose professorship and research field at Ruperto Carola is in Eastern European History.