Modern constitutions are at the centre of sociopolitical hopes and conflicts. Often understood as foundational documents of modern nation-states, they are associated with permanence and stability. However, the limits of the modern conception of constitutions become apparent when it comes to understanding the basic orders of societies and communities across space and time. Constitutions are based on social practices, making them a factor in the process of adaptation of social orders. This dimension becomes especially prominent in times of economic, social, and political change and crisis but has so far been neglected. This implies the need for a consistently interdisciplinary approach.
To this end, ConTrans brings perspectives from different disciplines together for the first time – from law and history to literary studies and psychology – in a comprehensive and sustained endeavour to investigate constitutions as social practices. Only in this way is it possible to comprehend variations of constitutionality across space and time. They range from symbols, rituals, and procedures to the discursive function of ‘ancient constitutions’ in modern debates. This requires an innovative analytical framework to explore communicative and institutional practices of different actors.
The goal of the participating researchers is to establish an international and interdisciplinary constitutional research programme in the humanities and social sciences through ConTrans and to give it concrete form in a Freiburg Centre for Interdisciplinary Constitutional Studies (FreiCIC).
Prof. Dr. Matthias Jestaedt is Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory at the Institute of Political Science and Philosophy of Law, where he serves as director of the Department of Legal Theory at the Faculty of Law. He is also an international correspondent of the Hans Kelsen Institute in Vienna, as well as a member of its board of directors since 2012. He is head of the Hans-Kelsen-Forschungsstelle. He has been a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature since 2014. His research foci are constitutional law and constitutional comparison, European human rights protection, state-church law, legal theory and theory of legal science, child and youth welfare law, and Hans Kelsen. He is a member of the ‘GE Commission to Address Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Freiburg’.
Prof. Dr. Jörn Leonhard is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Western European History at the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities. He was the founding director of the School of History at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS). His work has been recognized with the Baden-Württemberg State Research Prize, among others. His research focuses on comparative European and global history of the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in relation to the topics war and peace, violence and politics, and empires and nation-states. He is a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, an honorary fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wadham College, and a member of the academic advisory boards of the House of History Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart and the German Historical Institute London. He is currently directing the research project ‘The World Crisis, 1918–1941’, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation’s Opus Magnum Programme.
Prof. Dr. Sitta von Reden is Professor of Ancient History at the Department of History. She also teaches at the University College Freiburg and in the Interdisciplinary Anthropology master’s programme. She is principal investigator of the project ‘Beyond the Silk Road’, funded by the European Research Council with an ERC Advanced Grant. Her research foci include Greek history, ancient economic and global history, Hellenistic Egypt, and the political culture of Greece and Athens, as well as comparative history of ancient empires.
