Dr Marietta van der Tol to take up the Landecker Lectureship at the Faculty of Divinity
The Alfred Landecker Foundation has awarded Dr Marietta van der Tol (Trinity College) one of its prestigious Landecker Lectureships, carrying €600,000 in funding for the five-year project “Imagining Sacred Lands: the ‘Russian World’, ‘Hungarian World’, and ‘Holy Serbia’”. The Landecker Lecturer Program’s mission is to support outstanding, cutting-edge research on the origins, modes of action and aftermath of the Holocaust, on the social and political transmission of its memory, the influence of conspiracy ideologies and group-based enmity as a threat to democracy.
The core research of the project studies the relationship between space, identity and borders in Russia, Hungary and Serbia, and their relationship with territories that are no longer under their control: Ukraine, Transylvania, and Kosovo. Through the lens of the political imaginaries of the Russian World, Hungarian World, and Holy Serbia, this project will analyse competing conceptions of the sacred underpinning illiberal accounts of democracy and political authority. The project will engage with Eastern as well as Orthodox conceptual discourses on politics and religion to grasp what is at stake with the rise of hybrid authoritarianism in Europe: the assertion of “sacred geographies” beyond one’s own borders, Russia’s growing sphere of influence through its support for far-right movements and spread of disinformation, as well as democratic stability across the European continent.
The grant will facilitate academic workshops, public engagement, collaborative publishing, a Summer School, and the continuation of the Political Theologies conference series. Thus, the Landecker Lectureship provides important infrastructure for collaborative analysis of the transnational Christian Right in Europe, religious support for (hybrid) authoritarianism, the Russian Orthodox Church’s legitimation of war in Ukraine, and the increasing influence of illiberal politics in right-wing politics globally. Dr van der Tol will supervise MPhil and PhD students, and teach a new module on Democratic Backsliding as part of the MPhil pathway Religion & Conflict in the Faculty of Divinity. She will also teach the module in the MPhil in Politics and International Studies at the Politics Department, where she is an affiliated lecturer.
Dr van der Tol joined the University of Cambridge in October 2024, having been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Previously, she was postdoctoral research fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government (University of Oxford/New College) and College Lecturer in Politics at St Peter’s and Lincoln College (Oxford), teaching History & Politics and PPE. Her book Constitutional Intolerance: The Fashioning of the Other in Europe’s Constitutional Repertoires appeared with Cambridge University Press in January 2025. The book explores the impact of right-wing movements on the development of constitutional law across Europe, with case studies on France, the Netherlands, Hungary and Poland. Central in this study is the relationship between public space, othering, and constitutionalism.
The Faculty of Divinity expresses its deep gratitude to the Landecker Lecturer Program and the Alfred Landecker Foundation for their generosity.
An exemplar of impactful research and leadership
The Cambridge Interfaith Programme team is delighted to share this announcement, and to welcome Dr van der Tol’s energies as a catalyst for CIP endeavours in the domain of religion, politics and policy. We also celebrate what Marietta will bring to our early career community, as an exemplar of impactful research and leadership.