Dr. Sundar Henny is an historian of early modern Europe, interested in the history of ethnography, comparatism, and archives. He is an Ambizione fellow at the University of Bern and a visiting professor at the HCMH. His current project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, is entitled Navel of the World: Cross-Cultural Encounters at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 1400–1600. In this project, Christianity’s most prominent pilgrimage destination in Jerusalem serves as a prism for the study of late medieval and early modern notions of cultural and religious diversity. The project takes into account sources from Latin (Western European) as well as from Armenian and Greek pilgrims and residents.

In the past, Sundar worked on autobiographical writing in 17th-century Zurich. A revised version of his doctoral thesis (University of Basel, 2012) appeared as Vom Leib geschrieben: Der Mikrokosmos Zürich und seine Selbstzeugnisse im 17. Jahrhundert (Böhlau, 2016). He has conducted postdoctoral research on the reception of Strabo at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University and taught at the Universities of Basel, Bern, and Lucerne. In 2018, he published an edition with commentary of Isaak Iselin’s Geschichte der Menschheit (1764), an Enlightenment classic and the first history of mankind in German.