Prof. Philip Michael Forness (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)

Prof. Philip Michael Forness is currently Associate Professor of Eastern Christianity in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (since 2022). He earned a Bachelor of Arts with majors in Classics and Theology and minors in Hebrew and Humanities from Valparaiso University in 2007, and obtained a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary in 2011. He defended his doctoral dissertation in 2016, also at Princeton Theological Seminary, on the Syriac poet and homilist Jacob of Serugh. He subsequently held a post-doctoral position within the Leibniz Project “Polyphony of Late Antique Christianity” (2016–2019) and was the principal investigator of the BMBF Project “Cultural Exchange from Syria to Ethiopia” (2019–22), both at Frankfurt am Main’s Goethe University. His research focuses on the theology, literature, and history of eastern Christianity, with a particular emphasis on the sermons, translations, and theological poetry of the Syriac Christian tradition. He is the author of two books on Jacob of Serugh: Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) and Jacob of Serugh: Homily on the Apostle Thomas and the Resurrection of Our Lord (Leuven: Peeters, 2022). He also published two volumes with English translations of the Syriac version of 1 and 2 Maccabees accompanied by extended cultural historical introductions: 1 Maccabees (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2022), 2 Maccabees (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2022). He leads the project “Epistolary Culture and the Formation of the Syriac Orthodox Church: The Letters of Philoxenus of Mabbug (d. 523)” (since 2024) and is the co-principal investigator of the project “Commentary on John of Ephesus’s Ecclesiastical History” (since 2022), based in Frankfurt am Main and Leuven. In his teaching, he focuses on the global history of premodern Christianity and seeks to integrate eastern Christian texts and traditions into the broader theological curriculum. He offers a general course on the history eastern Christianity, a seminar on the Syriac Christian tradition, and language courses in Syriac and Coptic.