Franziska Kleybolte has been a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Contending with Crises research group since January 2026. Her research focuses on Jewish–Christian relations in medieval Europe and their reflection in material and spatial culture, as well as on the application of postcolonial and critical heritage approaches to premodern contexts.
After completing her studies in History and Art History in Munich, Pisa, Tel Aviv, and Oxford, she did her PhD at the Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics at the University of Münster, which she submitted last year. Her doctoral research examined the phenomenon of synagogue-to-church conversions in late medieval Castile, with a particular focus on religious space, power, and interreligious relations.
She worked as a research assistant in the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Münster, where she taught undergraduate courses in methodology and medieval Iberian history, and at the Bet Tfila Research Centre for Jewish Architecture at the Technical University of Braunschweig. There, she contributed to the development of a teaching network in Jewish Heritage Studies and taught courses in this field.
Her current research explores Jewish responses to spatial crises in medieval Europe, examining how such crises were experienced, anticipated, and negotiated, and which strategies Jewish communities developed to cope with spatial loss, displacement, and insecurity.