Dr. Brendan Röder

Brendan Röder is a research assistant at the Chair of Early Modern History at the History Department of LMU. His dissertation, which he defended in 2019, lay at the intersection of physical, legal and religious history and was published in 2021 as ‘Der Körper des Priesters. Gebrechen im Katholizismus der Frühen Neuzeit’ (The Body of the Priest: Infirmity in Early Modern Catholicism). The research for this book was conducted in Rome and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. Brendan Röder then worked as a postdoctoral researcher and, from 2023, as principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Cultures of Vigilance’. He held visiting positions abroad in Berkeley, Budapest, London, Rome and Oxford. His research interests include the history of the body, medicine and the senses, legal and urban history, and the global history of Catholicism.

Project at CAS:

At CAS, Brendan will be working on his second book project (habilitation) on preventive practices against urban hazards. Using the example of early modern Augsburg, the project investigates the involvement of residents in fire and food safety as well as the prevention of epidemics. Contrary to notions of fatalism or a disciplinary instrumentalisation of threats ‘from above’ hazard prevention appears as a complex field of communal interaction in which the perception, reporting and combating of hazards often took place among the population. At the same time, the stay is intended as an explorative phase for a new project on murder cases in the Catholic Church. The project will draw on extensive archival records and promises new insights into the history of criminality and the global administration of the Church.