Arndt Engelhardt is a cultural historian and has been working at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture (DI), Leipzig, as a Research Associate since 2006. He studied History (Medieval and Modern), General and Comparative Literature, and Germanics at Leipzig University and the University of Coimbra, Portugal (2000/2001). He received his Ph.D. at the University of Leipzig in 2011 with a dissertation, under the direction of Prof. Dan Diner (Jerusalem/Leipzig), on the nineteenth and twentieth-century network of European scholarship and Jewish encyclopedias. It was published as “Arsenale jüdischen Wissens. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der ‘Encyclopaedia Judaica’” in 2014 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen. His research project “Public Emancipation and Literary Belonging: On the Materiality of German-Language Jewish Publishing Cultures in the Nineteenth Century” reconstructs the material and cultural dimensions of the German-language Jewish book trade in the emancipatory age. During his stay at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem he was also a member of the working group “Cultural Agency, Transnational innovation, and Publishing Economics: The Romm Printing House and the European Republic of Letters.”

His current research at the Franz Rosenzweig Center explores the cultural, social, and political memory of the “House of the Consul” (Dar al-Consul) and its significance as a microcosm of 19th-century cosmopolitan life. Focusing on the fifteen-year tenure of Consul Georg Rosen and his wife Serena from 1852 to 1867 in Jerusalem, this study examines how the Prussian consulate became a unique crossroads of European diplomacy and local culture, bringing together Christians, Jews, Muslims, international guests, local authorities, and the Ottoman administration. Serena Rosen, a pianist and painter from a prominent Jewish family that converted to Anglicanism in London, played a central role in shaping the remarkable consulate’s social life, bridging European and local cultural traditions.