Meet the director
Björn Krondorfer is Director of the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University and Endowed Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies. He received his Ph.D. at Temple University, Philadelphia. His field of expertise is religion, gender & culture, and (post-) Holocaust and reconciliation studies. His scholarship helped to define the field of Critical Men’s Studies in Religions. He was a guest professor at the Institute of Theology and the History of Religion at the Freie University Berlin, Germany (2007-08) and held the status of visiting Faculty Affiliate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is the recipient of the Norton Dodge Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievements. In 2020, he has been elected chair of the “Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies.”
He has been invited to speak, present his research, and facilitate intercultural seminars in South Africa, Australia, South Korea, Finland, Armenia, Poland, United Kingdom, Italy, Israel & Palestine, Germany, Switzerland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada. Publications include Unsettling Empathy: Working With Groups in Conflict (Rowman and Littlefield 2020), The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquires 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 (SCM London, 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 (inter)national academic symposia and has mentored the creation of exhibits on Life and Death in the Bedzin Ghetto, Resilience: Women in Flagstaff’s Past and Present, and The Berlin Wall. He has co-curated the art exhibitions Wounded Landscapes (2014) and Echoes of Loss: Artistic Responses to Trauma (2018). He has been awarded a one-month residential fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute on the theme of “truth and reconciliation” (2019).