Meet the director

Björn Krondorfer is Regents’ Professor and the Director of the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University. As Endowed Professor of Religious Studies, he also teaches in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies. His field of expertise is religion, gender, and culture, and (post-) Holocaust and reconciliation studies. His scholarship helped to define the field of Critical Men’s Studies in Religions. In 2007-08, he was guest professor at the Institute of Theology and the History of Religion at the Freie University Berlin, Germany, and he held the status of visiting Faculty Affiliate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He received a Senior Research Fellowship at the Research Institute CLUE+ (in affiliation with Faculty of Theology) at the Vrije University in Amsterdam (2016/2017) and he is the recipient of the Norton Dodge Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievements. As of 2023, he is a member of “Content Advisory Group” of the Arizona Jewish Historical Society’s Hilton Family Holocaust Education Center (HFHEC) to assist with the Planning for the future Holocaust education museum in Phoenix, AZ.

He has been invited to speak, present his research, and facilitate intercultural seminars in Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Israel & Palestine, Poland, Rwanda, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States. Publications include the revised and expanded edition of his co-authored, Mit Blick auf die Täter: Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945 (2022; first edition 2006); Unsettling Empathy: Working with Groups in Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020); The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men (SUNY 2020); Reconciliation in Global Context: Why it is Needed and How it Works (SUNY, 2018); Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination (Stanford UP, 2010); Men and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism (London, SCM, 2009); Men’s Bodies, Men’s Gods (New York UP, 1996); Remembrance and Reconciliation (Yale UP, 1995); and Body and Bible (Trinity Press, 1992). He guest-edited four journal issues: Strangers or Neighbors? Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Perspectives on Refugees (CrossCurrents 2018), Antisemitism and Islamophobia (CrossCurrents 2015), Masculinities and Religion (Religion and Gender 2012), and Embattled Masculinities in the Religious Traditions (CrossCurrents 2011). He also published three volumes in German on the cultural and theological legacy of the Holocaust, and edited Edward Gastfriend’s My Father’s Testament: Memoir of a Jewish Teenager, 1938-1945 (Temple UP, 2000). He serves on several editorial and advisory boards.

As director of the Martin-Springer Institute, he has organized several international academic symposia, and has mentored the creation of the following traveling and digital exhibits, Stories from the Spanish Civil War; Gino Parin: A Complicated Life in Complicated Times; Through the Eyes of Youth: Life and Death in the Bedzin Ghetto; Resilience: Women in Flagstaff’s Past and Present; The Kuykendall World War II Photography Collection. He also was instrumental in creating the permanent installation of the NAU exhibit, Berlin Wall. He has curated the art exhibitions, A Complicated Life in Complicated Times: Gino Parin and the Holocaust (2023); Echoes of Loss: Artistic Responses to Trauma (2018), and Wounded Landscapes (2014). In 2019, he was awarded a one-month residential fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute on the theme of “truth and reconciliation.”

Advisory and Editorial Boards

  • International Advisor: European wasatia Graduate School for Peace and Conflict Resolution [Europa University Flensburg, Germany and Maecenata Foundation] (2020-to date)
  • Honorary Committee Member for the establishment of the Social Museum of Jewish History and Heritage of Kielce, Poland (2023-to date)
  • Academic Advisory Council: theologie.geschichte  [peer-reviewed journal on theology and contemporary church history, Germany] (2007-to date)
  • Advisory Board: Religion and Gender [Brill: interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal] (2009-to date)
  • Editorial Board: CrossCurrents (2009-to date)