Scientific Advisory Board

The members of our Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) are (external) scientists from VDTR disciplines with an international research profile and plenty of experience in supporting young scientists. The School is proud to be able to rely on these experts to raise its profile internationally. The current members of the SAB will be active until 2025.


John S. Kloppenborg is Professor of Religion in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He holds the rank of University Professor, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a fellow of Clare Hall (Cambridge), and a research fellow of the Department of New Testament and Related Literature in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Pretoria. He has taught at the University of St. Michael's College and the University of Windsor, and was visiting Professor at the Claremont Graduate University. He is associate editor a several academic journals in the area of the study of religion, and works on social history of early Christianity, the Synoptic Problem, and James.

He is the author of twelve books, including most recently James (New Testament Guides, London 2022); Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. Vol. 3 of Greco-Roman Associa­tions (Walter de Gruyter 2020); Christ's Associations: Connecting and Belonging in the Ancient City. (Yale University Press 2019), Attica, Central Greece, Macedonia, Thrace. Vol. 1 of  Greco-Roman Associations, with Richard S. Ascough (Walter de Gruyter 2011), and The Tenants in the Vineyard: Ideology, Economics, and Agrarian Conflict in Jewish Palestine (Mohr Siebeck 2006). 


Kristina Stoeckl (1977, Austria) is a full professor of sociology at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. She is also an associate professor at the University of Innsbruck, where she has worked since 2015 and held a full professorship in sociology from 2019 - 2023. She studied Comparative Literature and Russian at the University of Innsbruck (2001) and International Relations and European Studies at the Central European University in Budapest (2003). She holds a Phd in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence (2007). Before joining the University of Innsbruck in 2015, she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Post-Doc Fellow at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (2009-2012) and APART Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the University of Vienna (2012-2015). Among her most significant achievements in the recent years are an ERC Starting Grant and FWF Start Prize for the project “Postsecular Conflicts” (2015-2022). In the past, she has been invited as Visiting Fellow at the IWM – Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies in Florence, and Uppsala University. Her research areas are sociology of religion, political sociology and political theory, with a focus on politics and religion, on state-religion relations in Russia, norm and anti-gender mobilizations and transnational religious actors. She has published The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (2014) and Moralist International. Russia in the Global Culture Wars (forthcoming 2022) as well as numerous journal articles in Religion, State and Society, Global Networks, Journal of Contemporary Religion and others. 

Since 2016, Kristina Stoeck is a Member of the >> Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.


For an insight into Jens Schröter’s biography, his key research areas, memberships and current research projects, you can consult his profile at the Humboldt Universität Berlin.