Klaus Koschorke


Klaus Koschorke is a German historian of Christianity and was a Professor of Early and Global History of Christianity at the University of Munich in Germany from 1993 to 2013.

Biography

After studying Protestant theology in Berlin, Heidelberg, Edinburgh, Tübingen and Heidelberg from 1967–1973, Klaus Koschorke completed his doctoral degree in Heidelberg in 1976 with a dissertation on the newly discovered Coptic-Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi. He was a research assistant in Heidelberg and assistant professor in Bern, where he qualified as a university lecturer in 1991 with his habilitation thesis on 4th century Greek ecclesiology. Also during this time he held guest professorships and teaching positions in Switzerland and in Asia.

Academics

From 1993 to 2013, succeeding Georg Kretschmar, he held the Chair of Church history at the University of Munich. He developed it – in addition to the treatment of classical patristic themes – into the only Chair of Church history at a Faculty of Protestant Theology in German-speaking central Europe that has specialized in the history of non-western and global Christianity. Its many projects have aimed at developing an ecumenically oriented church history that pays proper attention not only to the denominational, but also to the geographical and cultural-contextual plurality of world Christianity.
Koschorke was dean of the Faculty for Protestant Theology at the University of Munich from 2003-2005. Regular research stays and lecture trips led him to Asia, Africa and Latin America. He inaugurated and developed the Munich-Freising-Conferences as an international platform for interdisciplinary exchange between scholars from various fields of professional expertise and regional or denominational background and as an instrument for the further development of the new historical subdiscipline "History of World Christianity". Koschorke has been appointed guest professor at Liverpool Hope University in 2010 and at the University of Basel and has been serving as visiting professor in Sri Lanka, India, China, Japan, Korea, Myanmar Singapore, Pakistan, South Africa, Uganda and delivered repeatedly lectures in Brazil and in the United States. Current research projects are focused on the broad spectrum of "Christian Internationalisms around 1910".
The scholarly approach to the History of World Christianity developed by Koschorke and some of his colleagues in Munich has recently been labeled as the "Munich School of World Christianity". It can be characterized by its focus on three guiding principles: the need for new and enlarged maps of the history of World Christianity that enable a comparative study of the different denominational, regional, and cultural expressions of Christianity; an awareness of "polycentric structures" in the history of World Christianity - not only in the most recent period but from its very beginnings; and a focus on transregional links between Christian groups and movements in different regions and continents and the resulting concept of a global history of Christianity as a history of multidirectional transcontinental interactions, including early instances of South–South connections.

Editor of the following book series