Dr. Lina Aschenbrenner

Study of Religions with special focus: Islam

Institute of Cultural Studies

Tel.: +49 89 6004-4603

Lina Aschenbrenner is a scholar of religion with a background in cultural studies. She researches and analyzes contemporary lived religion, its performance, and practices in relation to social dynamics. In doing so, she focuses on religious materiality and its relational and sensory dimensions. Her field of research is female “spirituality” (e.g., in connection with motherhood) as well as neo-spiritual body and movement practices (e.g., yoga or free dance and movement practices) in a global context and in the context of neoliberal consumer societies in particular. She also deals with global indigeneity and the role of indigenous practices (e.g., Hawaiian hula) as part of Western and indigenous lived religion. Her interests lie in the further development of body- and sensory-centered field research methods and the design of aesthetic analysis tools such as “aesthetic assemblage.”

Lina Aschenbrenner received her doctorate from the University of Salzburg in 2020 with a project on neo-spiritual aesthetics and embodied experience in the context of the dance improvisation practice Gaga in the research field of Tel Aviv, Israel. Her research findings have been published by Bloomsbury Academics under the title “Neo-Spiritual Aesthetics” (2023). From 2021 to 2022, she began her postdoctoral research project on Hawaiian hula as a global practice with a scholarship from the State of Thuringia at the Universität Erfurt. From 2022 to 2025, she was part of the DFG research group “Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective” at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Nürnberg-Erlangen as a research coordinator. In 2023, she spent a six-month DAAD research stay at the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa. Since December 2025, Lina Aschenbrenner has been part of Prof. Robert Langer's religious studies team at Universität der Bundeswehr München.

Areas of research

Lived religion
Neo-Spirituality
Culture and Religion in Hawai‘i
Religion and Power
Religion and Gender
Materiality
- Aesthetics of Religion
- Ritual
- Performance
- Embodiment

Publications (selected)

Aschenbrenner, Lina. 2024a. „Aesthetic Assemblages: Relational Aesthetics of the Israeli Movement Practice Gaga“. Material Religion, März, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2024.2303899.

Aschenbrenner, Lina. 2024b. „Studying the Materialization of Power in the Body: The Aesthetics of Neo-Spirituality“. Implicit Religion. https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.25347

Aschenbrenner, Lina, and Katharina Waldner (eds.). 2024. Aesthetics and Affects of Power in the Context of Religion. Special issue Implicit Religion Vol. 26 No. 1.

Aschenbrenner, Lina. 2023. Neo-Spiritual Aesthetics. Embodied Transformation in the Israeli Movement Practice Gaga. Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Aschenbrenner, Lina, and Anne Koch. 2022. „Do Gaga, Be Well? Well-being as Intersectional Dispositif in the Neo-spiritual Israeli Movement Practice Gaga“. In New Spiritualties and the Culture of Well-being, edited by Géraldine Mossière, 169–84. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06263-6_11.

Aschenbrenner, Lina, and Laura von Ostrowski. 2022. „Embodied Neo-Spirituality as an Experience Filter: From Dance and Movement Practice to Contemporary Yoga“. Body and Religion. https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.20526.