Dirk SCHUSTER
Dirk SCHUSTER
Teaching Fellow
Dirk Schuster is Teaching Fellow at the Department of Religious Studies where he has previously been a Fritz Thyssen Fellow (2019–2021). Since 2021, he is also 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. While at the Department of Religious Studies in the autumn/winter semester 2019/2020, he explored the discourses concerning Atheism among Austrian Communists and Social Democrats between 1945 and 1990. In the autumn/winter semester 2020/2021, he resumes his research focusing on the years between 1918 and 1945. Additionally, he investigates the Protestant Anti-Semitic Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen (German Christians' Church Movement) in Austria during the years 1928 to 1945.