Moritz MAURER

FWF Fellow (2025–2028)
Research Fellow (2024–2025)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moritz Maurer is an FWF Fellow (2025–2028) at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna, where he was previously a Research Fellow (2024–2025). He studied Religious Studies at the University of Heidelberg (B.A. 2012; M.A. 2015) and Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental Studies in London (M.A. 2015). In 2022, he completed his doctorate at the Institute for Religious Studies at Heidelberg University with the support of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. In 2024, his doctoral thesis was published as Kosmos, Gesellschaft, Religion [Cosmos, Society and Religion] by de Gruyter in the series Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten. From 2022 to 2023, he was a research assistant at the Institute for Religious Studies at Heidelberg University, and in the summer semester of 2025 at the University of Göttingen. He has taught classes at the Universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt and has worked for the DFG long-term project Zoroastrian Middle Persian: Digital Corpus and Dictionary at Ruhr University Bochum.
Moritz Maurer has intensively researched late antique Iranian religious history. His focus here is on Middle Iranian Manichaean and Zoroastrian texts. His current research focusses on the connections between esotericism, alternative religion, and right-wing extremism as well as the history of free religious groups in German-speaking countries. He has published on QAnon, right-wing meme cultures, and conspirituality. His research at the University of Vienna focuses on Traditionalism.