Gerlings, Dr. Jonas

Gastwissenschaftler im Rahmen eines Gerda-Henkel-Fellowships für Wissens- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte am IZEA

Dauer des Aufenthalts: August - November 2025

Jonas Gerlings is an Intellectual Historian working on the long Eighteenth Century. He has a particular interest in the Baltic Sea region and its global context. He defended his PhD at the European University Institute, Florence in 2017 and has since then held positions at the University of Copenhagen (2016-2017) and the University of Göttingen (2021-2024). He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh, Uppsala University, Göttingen Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Danish Academy in Rome. In 2022-2023 he was a Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. His research has been supported by grants from the Horizon 2020 (Marie Curie Global Fellow) and the Danish Council for Independent Research (Mobilex). He has published on a variety of fields within Enlightenment studies, from natural history and earth science to political economy and forensic psychiatry. He is currently working of notions of race and Blackness, as well as political theories of abolitionism in the long Eighteenth Century.

Anton Wilhelm Amo. Invisible Philosophers and the Rightes of Moors

The aim of the Gerda Henkel Fellowship for the History of Knowledge and the History of Science at the IZEA is to examine the institutional conditions and practices of knowledge production at the University of Halle through a biographical study of one of its students, Anton Wilhelm Amo. Amo, who studied at the University of Halle from 1727-1730 and later returned as a teacher (1736-1739), was a trafficked African who grew up at the court in Wolfenbüttel. Biographical details of Amo's first period in Halle are scarce and are limited to his enrolment in 1727 and his disputation on the rights of the Moors in 1729, supplemented by a short biography. However, one of Amo's biographers, Ottmar Ette, has noted that this was the period in which Amo went from being the object of his own story to becoming the subject. In order to trace this development, this study attempts to do two things: First, it seeks to analyse Halle (1720s - 1730s) as an intercultural site of knowledge production in order to reconstruct Amo's academic trajectory. Second, it seeks to reconstruct the question of slavery within the discipline of law in the Halle debates in order to analyse the disciplinary space in which Amo's now lost disputation intervened.