About us

As its name indicates, the Faculty contains three Departments: History, Philosophy, and Theology. The Faculty of History, founded in 1973, was joined by the Department of Philosophy (founded in 1971) in 1980 and the Department of Theology (since 1980) in 2002. Although not forming one Faculty right from the start, all three departments were set up at the young reform university in Bielefeld with one goal in common: to take their disciplines forward in a new direction. This applies just as much to the theoretical orientation and transcending of epochal demarcations in history as to the analytical and theory-of-science approach in philosophy or to the interdisciplinarity of research in theology.

Although the Departments of History, Philosophy, and Theology each have their own specific profile, numerous members of each department cooperate across departments in joint projects. For example, members of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Science/I²SoS hosted by the Faculty, are studying the social conditions and implications of scientific knowledge from the perspective of the history of science, the philosophy of science, and economics. Moreover, the Department of History and the Department of Philosophy are both responsible for the interdisciplinary master’s course in History, Economics and Philosophy of Science/HEPS. Their research on science also makes a decisive contribution to the CRC 1288 ‘Practices of comparisons: Ordering and changing the world’ set up in 2017. In turn, sociology of religion projects within the Department of Theology, are integrated into the Center for InterAmerican Studies/CIAS hosted by the Faculty of History, Philosophy, and Theology together with the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, and they are also embedded in the BMBF Research Project ‘The Americas as Space of Entanglements’.

At the beginning and end of each semester, the Faculty colloquia provide a regular discussion forum. Each department takes it in turn to invite a renowned representative of its discipline to give a talk on a topic of broad interest to the entire Faculty. The Faculty also organizes a joint Graduate Day at which outstanding graduates are awarded the Claudia Huerkamp Prize by the Faculty’s own Committee for Gender Equality.