Julian STRUBE
Julian STRUBE
Assistant Professor
Room 012, 5th floor
Julian Strube is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies. He works from a global historical perspective about the relationship between religion and politics, as well as debates about the meaning of religion, science, and philosophy since the eighteenth century. In the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics" at the University of Münster, he started a project on exchanges between Hindu and Christian reformers, orientalists, theologians, and esotericists, which he continues and expands in Vienna. He previously completed a DFG-funded postdoc project about "Tantra within the Context of a Global Religious History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," which focuses on the exchanges between Bengali and Western intellectuals in colonial Bengal. To this end, he works with sources in various European languages and in Bengali. He studied Medieval/Modern History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at the University of Heidelberg (M.A. 2010; Ph.D. 2015). His studies and a temporary replacement as associate professor led him to the University of Amsterdam in the years 2009 and 2018, respectively. In the context of his M.A. thesis, he worked on the relationship between völkisch movements, National Socialism, neo-Nazism, and esotericism. This resulted in his first monograph about the fictitious energy Vril and its reception since the nineteenth century (Wilhelm Fink 2013). In 2015, he received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies for his dissertation about the relationship between Socialism, Catholicism, and Occultism in Nineteenth-Century France (published by De Gruyter in 2016, funded by the German National Academic Foundation). He received his Habilitation in Religious Studies at the University of Heidelberg in November 2020. In the winter semester of 2020/2021, he replaced the chair for Missiology, Ecumene, and Religious Studies at the University of Hamburg. He recently published Theosophy Across Boundaries, co-edited with Hans-Martin Krämer (State University of New York Press, 2020), followed by New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism (Brill, 2021, co-edited with Egil Asprem). Moreover, he co-edited a forthcoming special issue on "Global Religious History" with Giovanni Maltese for Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. In march 2022, his next monograph, Global Tantra: Religion, Science, and Nationalism in Colonial Modernity, was published with Oxford University Press.