Keynote Speakers

The scheduling and abstracts of the keynote speakers has been published. Download the PDF here.

We are proud to announce the following keynote speakers for EASR 2018:

Milda Ališauskienė

Milda Ališauskiene, Jono Petronio nuotr.Milda Ališauskienė is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. Her research interests include sociology of religion, New Age, New Religious Movements and secularisation. She co-edited (with Ingo Schroeder) Religious Diversity in post-Soviet Societies: Ethnographies of Catholic Hegemony and the New Pluralism in Lithuania (Ashgate, 2011). She is currently President of the International Association for the Study of New Religions.


Grace Davie

Photo of Professor Grace Davie

Grace Davie is professor of sociology at Exeter University (ret.). She has done extensive research on religion in contemporary European societies. She continues to work closely with the Uppsala Religion and Society Research Centre, more specifically with the Linnaeus Centre of Excellence: The Impact of Religion – Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy. Latest publications include Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).

 


Eugen Ciurtin

Eugen CiurtinEugen Ciurtin is senior researcher at the Institute for the History of Religions, Romanian Academy, Bucharest. His main fields of research comprise Indian Studies, Buddhist Studies, and History of Religions, including their historiography. He serves as Secretary of the Romanian Association for the History of Religions (www.rahr.ro). Latest publications include a critical edition of Mircea Eliade, Yoga. Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne (Studia Asiatica, December 2016).

 


Jörg Rüpke

Prof. Dr. Jörg RüpkeJörg Rüpke, since 1999 chair of comparative religion at the University of Erfurt, is the co-director of the Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, and co-director of the Research Group “Religious Individualization in Historical Perspective”. His research interests focus predominantly on religion in the Roman world. Latest publications include On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome (Cornell University Press, 2016), and Religious Deviance in the Roman World: Superstition or Individuality (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

 


Reinhard Schulze

Reinhard Schulze is professor for Islamic Studies and Oriental Philology at the University of Bern. His main research interests focus on Muslim social and cultural history from early modernity to contemporary times, with a special interest in politicial dimensions of modern Islam (Islam and Enlightenment, or the genealogy of political Islam). His studies emphazise the relevance of the Muslim world for the systematic study of religion. Latest publications include Der Koran und die Genealogie des Islam (Schwabe, 2015).

 


Dorothea Weltecke

Dorothea Weltecke is professor for History at the University of Frankfurt (till 2017 professor for the History of Religions, University of Constance). Her research interests include inter- and intra-religious dynamics in the history of religions in Europe and the Middle East, focusing on the medieval history of religious minorities, religious deviance, atheism and non-belief, and religious violence. Latest publications include “Der Narr spricht: Es ist kein Gott”: Studien zu Atheismus, Unglauben und Glaubenszweifel vom 12. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit (Frankfurt 2010), “Beyond exclusivism in the Middle Ages: On the Three Rings, the three Impostors and the discourse of multiplicity”, The Oxford Handbook of Abrahamic Religions (Guy Stroumsa, ed., Oxford 2015).