European Entangled Atheisms: Concepts of Unbelief and the People Shaping them from the 1860s to the 1940s

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Carolin Kosuch
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555895411

Our network, titled European Entangled Atheisms: Concepts of Unbelief and the People Shaping them from the 1860s to the 1940s, which we are proposing to the DFG for funding, seeks to establish a link between historical research on European atheism and the emerging field of Secular Studies. It brings together historians and academics from related fields such as religious studies and sociology from all over Europe who deal with non-religion and atheism in a joint working group. Our approach is a combination of intellectual and social history. The primary aim of our collaboration is to select and analyse important but hitherto overlooked texts on historical atheism that shed light on emerging non-religious discourses and social practices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in transnational entanglements. We intend to make these texts accessible to a wider academic community through a digital source edition accompanied by scientific commentaries on each text. The hosting institution for this database will be the Collegium Carolinum in Munich, which has a database infrastructure for digital editions that can be used for our project. It includes structured input fields for researchers, standardised queries of authority records and a tool for displaying online editions and network visualisations. With our digital collection of sources on European historical atheisms, we hope to draw attention to entangled European historical non-religious concepts and practices in the field of Secular Studies. A concluding international workshop will explore the intersections of social and intellectual history in the historiography of atheism and continue the groundwork laid by the network. The publication of a special open access issue of the journal Secular Studies (or a comparable journal) that deals with the question of the translation of terms and concepts of non-religion in transnational, social and intellectual historical dimensions is also part of our work programme. Such a publication is intended as a means of reaching a broad public and publicising our database.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Privatdozentin Dr. Heléna Tóth