Researcher of the Week

Friederike Schöpf, PhD

Research Associate

University of Münster

“I studied both Near Eastern Archaeology and Jewish Studies, and I have always sought to approach questions from an interdisciplinary perspective. My primary research interest concerns the dual—both physical and symbolic—dimensions of material culture and its potential for reconstructing social realities. Since textual sources predominantly reflect the concerns of the intellectual elite and thereby represent only a segment of medieval society, material culture—being used, seen, and shared by all—provides access to a broader spectrum of social experience.

My current habilitation project investigates the emergence and development of the so-called women’s synagogues (Frauensynagogen) in medieval Ashkenaz, with particular attention to the early and exceptionally well-preserved examples in Worms and Speyer. Central to this inquiry is the role of Jewish women and their religious practices in shaping these architectural spaces. By foregrounding a female perspective, my study examines the extent to which women contributed to the institutionalization and spatial configuration of synagogue life. Furthermore, I analyze the ways in which synagogue architecture—and its location within the urban fabric of medieval towns—interacted with contemporary building projects in episcopal cities.”

Visit Friederike’s Page


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Franziska Kleybolte (October 20, 2025). Researcher of the Week. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved March 6, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14zkg


About Franziska Kleybolte

After completing her studies in History and Art History in Munich, Pisa, Tel Aviv, and Oxford, Franziska Kleybolte began her PhD at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ at the University of Münster, which she is now finalizing. Her doctoral research examines the phenomenon of synagogue-to-church conversions in late medieval Castile. Currently, she is a research assistant in the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Münster, where she teaches undergraduate courses, and at the Bet Tfila Research Centre for Jewish Architecture at the Technical University of Braunschweig, where she develops a teaching network in Jewish Heritage Studies. Her research focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in medieval Europe and their reflection in material culture, as well as the application of postcolonial concepts to premodern contexts. In January 2026, she will join the research project “Contending with Crises” (Hebrew University, lead by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten) as a postdoctoral fellow, focusing on Jewish responses to spatial crises in Iberia and Ashkenaz.