Office of The Dean

Christopher Ocker is the GTU’s Interim Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs. Chris has been a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty of the GTU since 1992 and originally joined the San Francisco Theological Seminary of the University of Redlands in 1991. He formerly served as Associate Director of the GTU’s Center for Hermeneutical Studies, Co-Director of its Center for the Study of Religion and Culture, and chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion in the GTU; as the inaugural director of the Program for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry of the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia; and as interim dean and assistant provost of the University of Redland’s Graduate School of Theology. He has been a fellow of the Institute for European History in Mainz, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Constance, and a Sr. Fellow of the Center for the Comparative History of Monasticism at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany.

His most recent book The Hybrid Reformation: A Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History of Contending Forces (Cambridge 2022), was runner-up for the Roland H. Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth-Century Studies Society. He is the senior editor of the series Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions and a co-editor of Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte. He is currently working on a book about Christianity in Global History.