Assistant Professor

dirk.schuster@univie.ac.at

Room 09, 5th floor

Dirk Schuster is Assistant Professor at the Department of Religious Studies where he has previously been a Fritz Thyssen Fellow (2019–2021) and a Teaching Fellow (2019–2024). From 2021 to 2024, he has also been a Research Fellow at the Centre for Museum Collections Management, University for Continuing Education Krems. From 2014 to 2021, he was a Research Assistant at the Department of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Potsdam. Following his studies of Medieval/Modern History and Religious Studies at the University of Leipzig (M.A. 2009), he obtained his Ph.D. (Dr. phil. 2016) at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on Die Lehre vom »arischen« Christentum. Das wissenschaftliche Selbstverständnis im Eisenacher »Entjudungsinstitut« [The Doctrine of an "Aryan Christianity": The Scientific Self-conception of the Institute for De-Judaisation in Eisenach]. From 2011 to 2014, his doctoral research was funded by the Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation. Between 2015 and 2016, he was also Assistant at the research project Edition of the proceedings of the Protestant Regional Church in Romania at the University of Koblenz-Landau. He is a member of the German Association for the Study of Religion (DVRW) and speaker of the Working group mid-level faculty and junior staff (Arbeitskreis Mittelbau und Nachwuchs der DVRW). Since 2016, Dirk Schuster is Trust Lecturer of the Friedrich-Naumann Foundation. His main specialties are the interaction of religion and politics, atheism, and the history of the regional church of the Transylvanian Saxons.