Research Design

Modern regional and national history is characterized by a wide variety of topics and research interests. In contrast to its institutional foundation roughly a century ago under the traditional name "historical regional studies," it embraces not only a diversity of methods but also the diversity of its findings. This critically questions the long-held regularity and homogeneity of historical phenomena. At the intermediate and local, and thus the personal, level of observation, regional history derives its particular strength from its approach to the historical subject—the people themselves in their individual and social lives.

The Trier professorship for "historical regional studies" primarily seeks to connect political history with cultural and, in particular, social history. The period under consideration ranges from the late Middle Ages to contemporary history, with a focus on the early modern period. The geographical framework is based on the Rhine-Meuse-Moselle region, which had already defined the working area of the Trier Collaborative Research Center 235, and on the historical sub-regions of the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate, founded in 1947.

Stephan Laux is strongly interested in topics related to the reception and history of science, particularly historiography. He is also generally interested in the interplay between institutional and social factors, which can ideally be derived from still rarely used archival records within small-scale constellations. In recent years, he has also conducted intensive research on the 19th and 20th centuries.

A further focus, established by Prof. Rita Voltmer, is on discourses on magic and witchcraft, as well as corresponding scenarios of persecution, between late antiquity and the 21st century. Overall, the focus is on transregional, globally extending scenarios of exclusion, defamation and persecution between the Middle Ages and contemporary history (anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism, the history of witchcraft and crime, as well as the history of expulsion, flight and migration).