Prof. Dr. Thomas Hauschild (died May 4, 2026)

Prof. Dr. Thomas Hauschild passed away on May 4, 2026, in Hamburg. He was 70 years old. Most recently, he served as a professor of ethnology and comparative cultural sociology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg from 2008 to 2016.

He studied ethnology, folklore, and religious studies at the University of Hamburg, where he earned his doctorate in 1979 with a dissertation on the “evil eye.” After a brief stint as a researcher at the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin-Dahlem, Mr. Hauschild worked until 1990 on his habilitation thesis, which he wrote based on the results of his field research on religion and politics in the southern Italian province of Basilicata. After completing his habilitation at the University of Cologne, Mr. Hauschild continued his research on site at regular intervals and published his highly regarded work on “Power and Magic in Italy” in 2002. As early as 1992, he was appointed professor of ethnology at the University of Tübingen. In the summer semester of 2008, he finally moved to Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where he took early retirement in 2016. As part of his remarkable academic career, various visiting professorships and fellowships took him to the universities of Hamburg, Heidelberg, Bochum, and Hanover, among others, as well as to the Free University of Berlin, La Sapienza University in Rome, and the Istituto Orientale in Naples. For the summer semester of 2017, Thomas Hauschild was appointed Hans Blumenberg Professor at the Cluster of Excellence “Politics and Religion” at the University of Münster.

In addition to many other topics, Mr. Hauschild conducted research together with younger colleagues on syncretism among the religions of the Mediterranean region and on the geographical roots of religious fundamentalism in the Euro-Mediterranean region. Until 2013, Mr. Hauschild was co-editor of the *Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften* and the journal *Historische Anthropologie*, and since he has been a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.