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Sita Steckel received her doctorate in Medieval history in 2006 from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Her dissertation dealt with the networks and authority of scholars before the universities, when their role and importance was defined by religious rather than just learned expertise (published as Kulturen des Lehrens im Früh- und Hochmittelalter). She continues to be interested in the role of scholars in the Middle Ages and in medieval scholarly networks.
Currently, she is engaged in a study of the controversies and criticisms exchanged between different religious elites (clerics, monks and nuns, friars, and eventually laypeople) during the inner pluralization of Latin Christianity between the late eleventh and early fourteenth centuries. This research interest in polemics and controversies within Latin Christianity ties into a more general interest in forms of religious plurality and diversity, as well as the modern historiography of medieval religion with its conflicting master narratives of secularization and religious pluralization in the Western Middle Ages.
Sita Steckel was a Dilthey Fellow of Volkswagen Foundation during 2012–2019. She teaches at the University of Muenster as a professor for the history of the European high and late Middle Ages and is a Principal Investigator in the Exzellenzcluster "Religion and Politics. Dynamics of Tradition and Innovation".
Membership in research networks
Exzellenzcluster 212 Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Cultures, WWU Münster
European COST-Action network IS 1301 New Communities of Interpretation. Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Gesellschaft für Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (GUW)