Unsettling Empathy

Björn Krondorfer is Director of the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University and Endowed Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies. His field of expertise is religion, gender, and culture, and (post-) Holocaust and reconciliation studies. His scholarship helped to define the field of Critical Men's Studies in Religions. He has been invited to speak, present his research, and facilitate intercultural seminars in Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Israel & Palestine, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States. In 2007-08, he was guest professor at the Institute of Theology and the History of Religion at the Freie University Berlin, Germany, and he held the status of visiting Faculty Affiliate at the University of the Free State, South Africa.Publications include the forthcoming Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men (SUNY, 2020), Reconciliation in Global Context: Why it is Needed and How it Works (SUNY, 2018), Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination (Stanford UP, 2010), Men and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism (London, SCM, 2009), Men's Bodies, Men's Gods (New York UP, 1996), Remembrance and Reconciliation (Yale UP, 1995), and Body and Bible (Trinity Press, 1992). He guest-edited four journal issues: Strangers or Neighbors? Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Perspectives on Refugees (CrossCurrents 2018), Antisemitism and Islamophobia (CrossCurrents 2015), Masculinities and Religion (Religion and Gender 2012), and Embattled Masculinities in the Religious Traditions (CrossCurrents 2011). He also published three volumes in German on the cultural and theological legacy of the Holocaust, and edited Edward Gastfriend's My Father's Testament: Memoir of a Jewish Teenager, 1938-1945 (Temple UP, 2000). He serves on several editorial and advisory boards.As director of the Martin-Springer Institute, he has organized several international academic symposia and has mentored the creation of exhibits on Through the Eyes of Youth: Life and Death in the Bedzin Ghetto, the Berlin Wall, and Resilience: Women in Flagstaff's Past and Present. He has curated the art exhibitions Wounded Landscapes (2014) and Echoes of Loss: Artistic Responses to Trauma (2018). He has been awarded a one-month residential fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute on the theme of "Truth and Reconciliation" (2019).

This book is an in-depth reflection and analysis on why and how unsettling empathy is a crucial component in reconciliatory processes.