Nicole M. Bauer

Nicole M. Bauer has been a Privatdozent (holder of the Venia Legendi) at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna since 2025 and has been working as a University Assistant at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Graz since 2023. She leads the FWF-funded research project “Gender and the Bible”, which is carried out in cooperation with the Department of Biblical Studies and Historical Theology at the University of Innsbruck. In addition, she is affiliated as a Research Fellow with the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa and with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Heidelberg in the research group “Possession and Exorcism in Contemporary Society.”

She is also active as a trusted lecturer (Vertrauensdozentin) for the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES), coordinates the Erasmus+ international cooperation with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel), and serves as a board member of the Austrian Society for the Study of Religion (ÖRGW) as well as of the “Gender & Religion” working group of the German Association for the Study of Religion (AKGR). In 2025, she completed her Habilitation with the study “Between Medicalization, Psychologization, and Religious Tradition: A Religious Studies Investigation of the Contemporary Roman Catholic Field of Exorcists in Austria” and was awarded the Venia Legendi in Religious Studies at the University of Vienna.

She studied Sociology at the University of Graz (Mag. phil., 2005) and earned her doctorate in Religious Studies at the University of Heidelberg (Dr. phil., 2015). In addition, she completed the psychotherapeutic propaedeutic program at the University of Graz (2008) and the specialist training in systemic family therapy with the Austrian Association for Systemic Therapy and Systemic Studies (ÖAS) in Salzburg (2023), and has been working as a licensed psychotherapist in private practice since 2023.

Her teaching and research activities have included positions at the University of Innsbruck, among them the Department of Practical Theology and the Department of Biblical Studies and Historical Theology. Research stays have taken her to the University of Heidelberg, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Athenaeum Pontificium Regina Apostolorum in Rome, and the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Her research focuses on religion, medicine, and psychotherapy; Catholicism in contemporary society; transformations of Jewish and Christian identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; Kabbalah in past and present contexts; global transformations of exorcism and possession; the economics of religion; religion and gender; ethics and interreligious education; and the use of social-scientific methods in the study of religion.