The lecture will take place at 16:15 in lecture hall IV (HS IV). Abstract  How did the seemingly simple act of asking structured questions shape modernity? This project traces the social and epistemic history of questionnaires, surveys, and interrogations from seventeenth-century scientific societies to early twentieth-century statistical congresses. Focusing on five arenas—scientific inquiry, state governance, professional expertise, legal interrogation, and transnational standardisation—it explores how formalised questioning produced new forms of knowledge and authority. Through comparative archival case studies from Europe and North America, the project aims to explain the emergence of categories like “household”, “occupation”, and “truth”, linking their history to contemporary debates on data ethics, citizenship, and surveillance. The lecture will outline the research agenda and its relevance across the humanities and social sciences.

Religious studies researcher Dr. Ramona Jelinek-Menke joined the Department of Religious Studies team on 1 March 2025.

In January 2025, Vitor Barros received a doctoral scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation for his project ‘Ethnic differentiation and subtle racial animosity: Brazil (1887-2022)’.

Vitor Barros, FIW researcher, obtained the prize for Best Master Thesis 2023 in Sociology at the University of São Paulo.