Christopher Ocker


Christopher Ocker is a historian and the Director of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the in the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. He was formerly professor of history at San Francisco Theological Seminary, chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and an affiliate professor of the department of history, medieval studies, and the Center for the Study of Religion at the University of California Berkeley. Ocker is known for his works in the history of religion in Europe, Medieval and early modern intellectual and cultural history, and the social and political history of late medieval and early modern Central Europe.

Selected publications

Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Church-Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525–1547, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2006.
Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
"Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther, eds. Derek Nelson, Paul Hinlicky, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
"Explaining Evil and Grace," in Oxford Handbook of the Reformation, ed. Ulinka Rublack, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
with Kevin Madigan, “After Beryl Smalley: Thirty Years of Medieval Exegesis, 1984-2013,” Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, 2:87-130.
"The German Reformation and Medieval Thought and Culture," History Compass 10:13-46
"German Theologians and the Jews in the Fifteenth Century,” in Jews, Judaism and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, eds. Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2006.
"Armut und die menschliche Natur," Die neue Frömmigkeit: eine europäische Kultur am Ende des Mittelalters. Edited by Martial Staub and Marek Derwich, for the series Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenoeck und Ruprecht, 2004.
"Contempt for Jews and Contempt for Friars in Late Medieval Germany," Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, eds. Steven McMichael and Susan E. Myers, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004.
"Religious Reform and Social Cohesion," The Work of Heiko A. Oberman, eds. Thomas A. Brady and James Tracy, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002.