Matei Epure

Matei Epure is a fifth year PhD student in early modern European religious history. He is primarily interested in the interaction between Christianity and political regimes and the history of Christian political thought. His dissertation analyzes the development of the ideas of “loving one’s neighbor” and the “nation” in early Lutheran thought and their use within German vernacular preaching and print. His doctoral advisor is Joel Harrington.

In addition to his dissertation, Matei is working on projects on politically quietist denominations and on the place of confessional history within modern academia. He is preparing an article about the Pentecostal response to religious persecution in Communist Romania. He also organized a conference on the place of religious belief in the academic historiography of early modernity over the past two centuries.

As a former software engineer, Matei also pursues projects in the digital humanities. He is developing a web application that generates custom maps and research guides for the German Peasants’ War of 1525 and is interested in projects involving OCR and the digitization of medieval and early modern manuscripts. His dissertation likewise incorporates LLM-based pipelines for large-corpus analisys, such as quantitative studies of the prevalence of concepts such as the “nation” in sixteenth-century print.

Topics of Interest:

• Early modern religious history
• Love of neighbor
• History of the nation and political identities
• Confessional historiography
• Political theology
• Digital humanities