As the Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology, Professor Leppin’s scholarship is particularly interested in medieval and Reformation studies. He argues that the Reformation should be understood as a transformation of the the medieval world rather than a stark rupture. His work also focuses on the history of spirituality, mainly in mysticism. Educated at the University of Marburg Heidelberg University, and the Theological Academic Year in Jerusalem program, Volker Leppin received a chair in Church History at the University of Jena (Thuringia, Germany) in 2000. Ten years later, he moved to the University of Tübingen in Southern Germany, where he held the chair in Church History and directed the Institute for Late Middle Ages and Reformation from 2010 to 2021. He is a member of the Academies of Sciences at Heidelberg as well as the Saxonian Academy of Sciences, two distinguished scholarly societies in Germany.
