Bernd-Christian Otto
Bernd-Christian Otto studied Religious Studies, Philosophy and Psychology in a M.A. program and narrowed his focus to Religious Studies while writing his dissertation on the conceptual history of magic. After gaining his PhD in 2009, he joined the university of Bergen, Norway, as a visiting research fellow, where he took part in a book project entitled Defining Magic: A Reader (published 2013 with Michael Stausberg). From 2010 to 2014 he coordinated a research project on the historicisation of religion at the University of Erfurt, from 2014 to 2018 he worked as postdoctoral coordinator of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Religious Indivualisation in Historical Perspective at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt.
In 2017 he finished his Habilitation treatise entitled Ritual Dynamics and Rejected Knowledge: A Historical Study on a Deviant Text Tradition at the Max Weber Centre in Erfurt. Since 2018, he has worked as a Senior Research Fellow at various institutions, among them the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Dynamics in the history of religions between Asia and Europe at the university of Bochum, the International Consortium for Research in the Humanties Fate, Freedom and Prognostication: Strategies for Coping with the Future in East Asia and Europe at the university of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, beyond Modernities at the university of Leipzig. Currently, he works as scientific coordinator of the newly-founded Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective at the university of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Since 2016, Bernd-Christian Otto is a permanent board member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.
His research focuses on the history of magic, where he combines different methodologies such as conceptual history, discourse analysis, social theory, and ritual studies. His recent publications include the co-written monograph (together with Daniel Bellingradt) Magical Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe: The Clandestine Trade in Illegal Book Collections (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2017), the co-edited anthology (together with Martin Fuchs et al.) Religious Individualisation: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives (Berlin: De Gruyter 2019), and the co-edited anthology (together with Dirk Johannsen) Fictional Practice: Magic, Narration and the Power of Imagination (Leiden: Brill 2021).
Side interests include the reception of Buddha Maitreya in Western esotericism, processes of religious individualisation, ritual theories and dynamics, the relation between religion and ethics, and the peculiarities of religious experience. Bernd-Christian Otto has a broad interest and expertise in the history of Western learned magic, and is, since a few years, particularly interested in its modern and contemporary manifestations (magick).
Currently in preparation: a special issue of the journal Entangled Religions on the topic ‘Western learned magic as an entangled tradition’; and a monograph project with the working title ‘Building blocks of a cultural theory of magic’.