Karsten LEHMANN
Karsten LEHMANN
Professorial Research Fellow (2022–2025)
Karsten Lehmann is a sociologist and scholar of religion. Since 2016 he holds the chair of Interreligiosity at the Kirchliche Pädagogische Hochschule Wien/Niederösterreich (KPH). He studied at the Universities of Lancaster (M.A. in Religious Studies, 1995), Tübingen (Ph.D. in Sociology, 2000), and Bayreuth (Habilitation in Religious Studies, 2014). Before his appointment at the KPH Vienna/Lower Austria, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Observatoire des Religions en Suisse at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and at the Berkley Centre for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University (USA). In the academic year 2012/13, he worked as visiting professor of Religious Studies at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). He then served as Head of the Department of Social Sciences and Statistics (3S) in the now defunct research unit of KAICIID – International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue. In parallel to his work at the KPH, he was also Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Linz (2022–2023), Senior Research Fellow in Religious Studies at the Faculty of Evangelical Theology at the University of Vienna (2019–2021), and Visiting Professor of Empirical Religious Studies at the University of Greifswald (2019–2022).
His academic interests focus on the study of religious plurality at the boundaries between religion and other social fields such as education, politics, and the arts. His publications have covered topics such as new religious movements, religious associations of migrants, and the role of religiously affiliated actors in the context of the United Nations. Other research interests include (1) the demise of religious plurality in the interwar period; (2) religious and civil society networks "on the ground"; (3) interreligious contacts and dialogue; (4) religiously legitimised violence; (5) religions and (international) politics; and (6) methods of empirical religious studies. Since 2025 he has been Professorial Research Fellow at the Department of Religious Studies.