Academic Committee
Judith Gruber
Judith Gruber is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Director of the Centre for Liberation Theologies at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. She holds a research professorship awarded through KU Leuven’s BOF-ZAP program, recognizing internationally leading scholars with sustained excellence in research, leadership, and innovation.
Gruber’s research engages systematic theology in constructive dialogue with postcolonial, decolonial, and critical theory. Her work focuses on political theology, ecclesiology, race, and epistemic justice, with particular attention to how power, dissent, and coloniality shape theological knowledge and ecclesial practice. Across her scholarship, she advances theology as a critical, interdisciplinary practice that intervenes in contemporary debates on democracy, racism, decolonization, and institutional transformation.
She is the author of the award-winning monograph Intercultural Theology: Exploring World Christianity after the Cultural Turn (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; revised English edition 2018), widely regarded as a field-defining contribution to postcolonial theology. Her publication record includes one monograph, a revised translation, fourteen edited or co-edited volumes, more than thirty peer-reviewed journal articles, and numerous contributions to edited volumes. Her article “Revealing Subversions: Theology as Critical Theory” received the Catherine Mowry LaCugna Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America, marking significant international recognition.
Gruber currently leads and collaborates on several major externally funded research projects (FWO, KU Leuven, Horizon Europe), with total funding exceeding €5.2 million. She serves as Principal Investigator of projects such as Dissenting Church (Research Foundation Flanders - FWO) and Decolonizing the Catholic Church in Congo (KU Leuven Internal Funding), and as work-package co-supervisor in the Horizon Europe project RAISE, which investigates structural racism and social boundary-making in Western Europe. She supervises interdisciplinary teams of postdoctoral researchers and PhD candidates and is widely recognized for combining high-concept scholarship with strong research output and collaborative leadership.
Before joining KU Leuven in 2017, Gruber held a tenure-track position at Loyola University New Orleans. She earned her PhD in Theology (summa cum laude) from the University of Salzburg.
Dagmar Herzog
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she writes and teaches on the histories of gender and sexuality, Nazism and the Holocaust, disability activism and care work, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She is author of seven books, including Sex after Fascism (Princeton, 2005), Sexuality in Europe (Cambridge, 2011), Cold War Freud (Cambridge, 2017), and The Question of Unworthy Life (Princeton, 2024). Her most recent publication is The New Fascist Body (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025), and she is currently working on a project entitled Fascism's Lingering, based in a corpus of public opinion research conducted in post-Nazi Germany in the early 1950s.
Jonathan Judaken
Jonathan Judaken’s research focuses on representations of Jews and Judaism, race and racism, critical theory, existentialism, and post-Holocaust French Jewish thought.
His latest monograph, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism, came out in Columbia University Press’ “New Directions in Critical Theory” series in June 2024. It offers a comparative history of major theories of Judeophobia in the work of Sartre, Hannah Arendt, members of the Frankfurt School, Talcott Parsons, Zygmunt Baumann, Jean-François Lyotard, and in the work of two extraordinary historians, Léon Poliakov, and George Mosse, while seeking to challenge the conventions and narratives within the field of anti-Semitism studies based on their work. The book was the winner of the American Historical Association’s Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in Jewish Diaspora History, which recognizes the most distinguished work of scholarship on the history of the Jewish diaspora published in English during the previous calendar year.
Judaken is the author of several other notable works, including an edited collection entitled Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (SUNY Press, “Philosophy and Race” series, 2008), Naming Race, Naming Racisms (Routledge, 2009) and a co-edited book with Robert Bernasconi, Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context (Columbia University Press, May 2012). He also edited and introduced two important journal special issues, a roundtable in the American Historical Review on “Rethinking Anti-Semitism” (October 2018) and “Jews and Muslims in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher” in Jewish History (November 2018).
A founding member of the International Consortium for Research on Racism and Antisemitism, Judaken serves as the U.S. Consulting Editor for Patterns of Prejudice, on the Editorial Board for Jewish Historical Studies, on the Associate Editorial Board for Critical Philosophy of Race, on the Advisory Board for H-Antisemitism, as Past President of the North American Sartre Society, and on the International Board of Scholars for Facing History and Ourselves.
Moshe Sluhovsky
Moshe Sluhovsky is the Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in the Study of French Jewry and emeritus professor of History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and held positions at The California Institute of Technology and UCLA before joining the Hebrew University, where he taught for 30 years. Starting as an early modern Europeanist, specializing in religious history, he then moved to research modern gay and lesbian history, focusing on Germany and France. His current project takes him back to Catholicism: he is interested in the intersection of Radical Orthodox Catholicism with post-modern and post- colonial critiques of the Enlightenment. His main publications include: “Believe not Every Spirit": Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism and Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism (both published by The University of Chicago Press) and the collection Queer Jewish Lives between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine (Bielefeld: Transcript). At the Hebrew University he has served as Chair of the Department of History and the Institute of History, Chair of Amirim – the University-side Honors’ Program, and as the director of the Lafer Center for Women’s and Gender Studies.
