Research Fellow (2024–2026)

Tao Thykier Makeeff is a Research Fellow at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna. He holds a B.A. in the History of Religion (2005) and an extended research M.A. in Religious Studies (2012), both from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and a Ph.D. in the History of Religion from Lund University, Sweden (2019) the dissertation of which was awarded a prize by the Scientific Society in Lund. He has taught at several Scandinavian universities and was recently employed as Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Stavanger (2020–2023) and Guest Researcher at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark. His research focuses on contemporary receptions of Mediterranean, Scandinavian, and Chinese history and religious cultures and the uses of the past in gendered and gendering identity constructions. He has published extensively on the role of religion in historical reception, digital culture, identity construction, and the human body. His monograph on Contemporary Hellenic Polytheism is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. While a Research Fellow at the Department he is co-editing (with Jane Skjoldli) a collected volume on methodological, ethical, and didactic challenges to studying and teaching about contemporary receptions of the Norse Past for De Gruyter.