Professor Joachim Krause

Joachim Krause, born in 1978 in Filderstadt near Stuttgart, studied Protestant theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 2000 to 2004, political science and political philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, Biblical studies and Semitic languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 2004 to 2005, and Protestant theology once again at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen from 2005 to 2007. From 2008 to 2012, his dissertation on the composition of the Book of Joshua, written in Tübingen, was funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation; this included a research stay of several months at Yale University in the USA in 2009. Krause was awarded his doctorate in Tübingen in April 2013. From 2012 to 2015, he completed the vicariate and pastoral service at the Christuskirche in Stuttgart and in Nürtingen. Subsequently, he held a number of academic positions at the University of Tübingen and professorships at the universities of Hohenheim and Basel (Switzerland), before being appointed to Ruhr University Bochum in the summer of 2021. From 1 October 2021, he will assume the W2 professorship for the literary history of the Old Testament at the Faculty of Protestant Theology.

He explores how the Old Testament originated and which intentions – including political and political-theoretical ones – underlie the individual texts. In the process, he focuses on religion and its reflected manifestation, i.e. theology, as well as on political debates and, in this context, on questions of political theory: What is a good form of government, how can governance be achieved in such a way that it is beneficial to all?