Klaus Koschorke

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 (UK) in 2010 and at the University of Basel (Switzerland, 2014–2018) and has been serving as visiting professor in Sri Lanka (since 1982), India (Madurai), China (Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou), Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto), Korea (Seoul), Myanmar (Mandalay) Singapore, Pakistan (Lahore), South Africa (Pretoria), Uganda and delivered repeatedly lectures in Brazil and in the United States. Current research projects are focused on the broad spectrum of (both Western and Non-Western) "Christian Internationalisms around 1910" and a comprehensive history of Christianity in Asia, Africa and Latin America 1450-2000. In 2020 he was appointed Senior fellow at the KFG “Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities” at the History Dept. Frankfurt University.

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.

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 (Basil of Caesarea). Also during this time he held guest professorships and teaching positions in Switzerland and in Asia (foremost in Sri Lanka, 1982/3).

Klaus Koschorke (born 13 April 1948) 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.