PD Dr. Lorenz Trein
Research Associate, Private Lecturer
Chair of Religious Studies
Office hours:
By appointment (via e-mail)
Personal information
After studying Religious Studies, Ethnology, and Modern History in Munich, I completed my PhD under Jürgen Mohn at the University of Basel with a dissertation on the concepts of religion and Islam in German-speaking contexts of European religious history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the winter semester of 2017/18, I was a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies at LMU, where I collaborated with Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College) on issues related to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in religion-related sciences and humanities around 1900.
In 2022 and 2023, research stays with Jonathan Sheehan at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion facilitated the completion of my habilitation project, in which I explored secular and apologetic undertones in genealogical discourses on secularization.
In summer semester 2024, I co-organized the workshop History and the Secular together with Jonathan Sheehan and Robert Yelle.
Along with Christoph Auffarth, I co-edited the collection Säkulare Religion.
Since 2023, I have held the teaching qualification for the field of Religious Studies. My lectures have so far focused on the interpretative history of secularization, the discourse on the Anthropocene, and the question of whether religion is disappearing from society.
Even before my habilitation, I taught a number of courses, beginning when I was a teaching fellow in Religious Studies at the University of Basel (2010-2015). In terms of topics, these include introductions to the history of religion and to theory and methodology, as well as more in-depth courses (e.g. "Perceptions of Islam in religion, science and the humanities", "The 'Islamization of Islam' in European religious debates around 1900", "Religion, protest, and revolution" or "The end of the world as we know it: messianism and apocalypse in the present day") and a regular research colloquium.
As a representative of the academic staff, I am a member of the Faculty Council, the Postdoc Support Fund committee, and the mentoring program aimed at addressing structural disadvantages faced by women in academia, as well as the Joint Commission for the Interfaculty Study Program in Religious Studies.
Research interests
My research interests lie in the areas of general and systematic religious studies, science and religion, secularization and secularity, European religious history with a particular focus on the discourse surrounding Islam in its global contexts, theories of time and history, as well as conceptual history and the sociology of knowledge.
Currently, I am conducting research on the inaccessibility and transcendent references of historical and social time in discourses on the Anthropocene; on the linguistic shifts surrounding religion and secularization during the long 20th century; on the global politics of ideas concerning Islam and everyday conceptions of Islam, with a focus on Leopold Weiss/Muhammad Asad and Talal Asad; as well as on historical approaches to studying the secular in North America and Europe.
Selected publications
- Über die Unverfügbarkeit der Geschichte: Transzendenzbezüge historischer und sozialer Zeit in Diskursen über das Anthropozän. In: Barbara Picht, Henning Trüper (eds.): Epochenwenden und Epochenwandel, Göttingen: Wallstein 2024/25.
- Die unmögliche Möglichkeit der Geschichte eines Begriffs: Beobachtungen der Säkularisierung und der sprachliche Wandel der religiösen Semantik. In: Forum Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte 2024/25.
- ‚Unparteilichkeit ist nie die Sache religiöser Polemik gewesen‘: Wissenschaftlichkeit, Religion und ‚Islamfrage‘ im Kontext der Kolonialkongresse in Berlin, 1905 und 1910. In: Argos: Perspektiven in der Religionswissenschaft 2024/25.
- Säkulare Religion. Ein Beitrag zur Säkularisierungsdebatte, co-edited with Christoph Auffarth, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2024.
- Beobachtungen der Säkularisierung und die Grenzen der Religion, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2023.
- On Genealogy Critique of Secularized Christianity. In: Political Theology 22/6 (2021), pp. 457-474.
- Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization: Critiquing Max Weber’s Idea of Modernity, co-edited with Robert Yelle, London: Bloomsbury Academic 2021.
- ‚Weil das Christentum nie eine Geschichte hat haben wollen‘: Theologische Voraussetzungen und eschatologische Ambiguität der Säkularisierung in religionswissenschaftlicher Sicht. In: Theologische Zeitschrift 76/1 (2020), pp. 56-77.
- Feeling Religion (As a Matter of Method): Historical Meaning and Affective Engagement in the Study of Religion. In: Religion Compass 13/8 (2019), pp. 1-11.
- Governing the Fear of Islam: Thinking Islamophobia through the Politics of Secular Affect in Historical Debate. In: ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies 4/1 (2018), pp. 44-58.