The Department of the Study of Religions

A chair in religious studies was first established at the University of Vienna in 1955 within the Faculty of Catholic Theology, with the theologian and psychologist of religion Wilhelm Keilbach as its first head, though he left for Munich within a year and the department passed through a series of Old Testament and systematic theologians before religious studies properly separated from confessional theology as its own discipline.

The turning point came in the 1990s: Johann Figl founded the Austrian Society for Religious Studies in Vienna in 1996 explicitly to press for an independent degree, and the university launched its own diploma program in religious studies in 1999, the first time an Austrian university offered the subject as a standalone specialization rather than as an adjunct to theological training. The department that resulted, now the Department for the Study of Religions, is deliberately non-confessional: it studies traditions comparatively and historically rather than forming clergy for any one of them, and its research spans new religious movements, lived religion in contemporary Austria, and the history of religious studies as a discipline in its own right. That trajectory, from a theology-adjacent chair to an independent secular department, recurs across European universities of comparable age, and Vienna's version of it is unusually well documented because the department has published its own institutional history.