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. He received his Ph.D. at Temple University, Philadelphia. 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 Vrije University in Amsterdam (2016/2017) and is the recipient of the Norton Dodge Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievements. He is currently the VP of the “Association of Public Religious and Intellectual Life” (APRIL) and in 2020 was 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 Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Israel & Palestine, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Publications include 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. He has mentored the creation of several exhibits: Through the Eyes of Youth: Life and Death in the Bedzin Ghetto; Resilience: Women in Flagstaff’s Past and Present; and the permanent installation of a Berlin Wall exhibit at NAU. He has curated the art exhibitions Wounded Landscapes (2014) and Echoes of Loss: Artistic Responses to Trauma (2018). In 2019, he has been awarded a one-month residential fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute on the theme of “truth and reconciliation.”

Advisory and Editorial Boards