Picture: Universität Regensburg.

The Polin guest researcher Dr. Judith König, University of Regensburg, is one of the ten winners of the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. Our warmest congratulations to Dr. Judith König!

The Forschungszentrum Internationale und Interdisziplinaere Theologie (FIIT) at the University of Heidelberg (Research Center for International and Interdisciplinary Theology) annually honors 10 young scholars from all over the world for outstanding dissertations or the first post-doctoral work in the thematic complex “God and Spirituality (broadly understood)” through the “Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise”.

20 reviewers from currently 15 countries selected the awardees. The celebration of the Awards will take place at the University of Heidelberg in May 2024. The winners will receive a prize of € 3,000 each. The award ceremony is followed by a colloquium with the award winners at the International Science Forum Heidelberg (IWH), where they present their next research projects and discuss them with some evaluators and members of the FIIT.

PhD student Francis Benyah has been awarded the prestigious Lamin Sanneh Research Prize 2022-24. The prize sum is 10,000 USD.

Francis Benyah is a doctoral student at the Department for the Study of Religions at Åbo Akademi University, and his project is entitled ”Mapping Cosmologies of Mental Health: A Study on Pentecostal Prayer Camps and Indigenous Knowledge of Healing in Ghana”.

In addition to his doctoral research here at here at the Faculty of Arts, Psychology and Theology, Benyah teaches in the Master’s Degree Programme in Social Exclusion. His research interest focuses on African Pentecostal Christianity with a special interest in how it intersects and interact with public life in areas such as media, politics, health, and human rights.