It is with great sadness that we learned that our dear colleague and former visiting fellow Dr. Miriam Czock passed away on March 6, 2020, at the young age of 43 due to a serious illness.
Miriam stayed at the IKGF from October 2018 until September 2019. Throughout her time in Erlangen, she enriched our daily lives with her friendliness, open-mindedness and interest in her colleagues' research.
At the IKGF, Miriam pursued a project about the exegetical works of Rupert of Deutz to study his use of exegesis as a tool for perceiving and interpreting the future. She focused in particular on his De divinis officiis, a liturgical commentary written in the early 12th century. The study of liturgical texts constituted one of her main research areas and had already been central for her dissertation thesis (published in 2012 with De Gruyter) in which she analyzed the evolution of the sacralization of church buildings from late antiquity until the tenth century. Her other research interests included secular and church law in the early Middle Ages as well as perceptions of space in premodern times.
Miriam studied philosophy, history, German philology, and English literature at Trinity College Dublin and at the Ruhr-University Bochum from which she graduated with a PhD in medieval history in 2009. She worked and taught at the Technical University Dortmund, the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Tübingen and since 2012 served as an assistant professor and lecturer at the department of Medieval History of the University of Duisburg-Essen.
We feel truly blessed for the time that we were able to spend with Miriam, as well as for the many joyful events that she shared with us, including her birthday last year. She will be dearly missed by all of us and we extend our heartfelt condolences to her family.