About
Katerina Koci is a biblical scholar, theologian, and feminist researcher working at the intersection of scripture, gender, and political power. Born in Prague, she is currently Elise Richter Research and Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Vienna, where she leads the four-year FWF-funded project The Two Sarahs: Victimhood in the Bible and Its Reception.
Her research asks urgent questions: How do ancient narratives of sacrifice and victimhood — particularly stories of women in the Hebrew Bible — shape modern culture? And how are religious ideas and gendered concepts weaponized in contemporary authoritarian politics? She brings together biblical studies, feminist hermeneutics, and political theology to explore these intersections — and translates this work for broader audiences through public lectures, conference presentations, and this website.
Katerina is the founder and director of the interdisciplinary research group "Gender, Scripture, and Psychoanalysis" at the University of Vienna. She has organized major international workshops and conferences, guest-edited two peer-reviewed journal special issues, and published widely in leading theological and biblical studies journals. Her books include The Land without Promise (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2021) and the forthcoming Jephthah's Daughter in the Bible and Reception: Woman without a Name (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2026).
Her work has been recognized by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF Frauen in Spitzenforschung, 2024), the University of Vienna (Säule III Award, 2024), and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Women, Science and Research (2025). She holds a PhD from KU Leuven, Belgium (summa cum laude) and has held fellowships at Charles University Prague and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM Vienna). She lives in Vienna with her husband Martin, a theologian and philosopher, and their three children.
"So What Exactly Do You Do?"
A Modest Self-Interview
I study women who get sacrificed in the Bible. This tends to make dinner parties either very interesting or very quiet. After years of explaining my research to curious strangers, skeptical relatives, and occasionally bewildered grant committees, I thought it was time to interview myself. At least this way I can guarantee the questions won't be boring.
Let's start at the beginning. Where do you come from, and how did you end up doing what you do?
I was born and grew up in Prague, which is perhaps not the most obvious starting point for a career in biblical studies — but it shaped me more than I usually admit. Growing up in post-communist Central Europe gives you a particular sensitivity to the way ideology works: how it uses language, how it recruits history, how it tells people who they are and what they owe. I studied theology at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague before moving to KU Leuven in Belgium, where I completed a Research Master and eventually defended my doctoral dissertation in 2017, summa cum laude. I then held fellowships in Prague and at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, before joining the University of Vienna in 2024 as an Elise Richter Research Fellow. It's been a winding path — across countries, languages, and disciplines — but looking back, the thread has always been the same: I'm interested in how stories exercise power, and what happens to the people they leave out.
Your research focuses on sacrifice and victimhood. Isn't that a rather gloomy area to dedicate your life to?
People ask me this, usually with a slightly concerned look. But I'd push back on the framing. Yes, I work with stories of women being handed over, silenced, and destroyed — Jephthah's daughter, Hagar, Sarah. These are not cheerful bedtime stories. But understanding how victimhood works — how it gets constructed, instrumentalized, even glorified — is not gloomy. It's urgent. Especially right now, when we're watching gender become a political battleground across Europe and religious language being deployed to justify authoritarian control. The biblical texts, it turns out, are a remarkably good place to start understanding that.
Your current project is called "The Two Sarahs." Can you explain that without losing us in the first sentence?
I'll try. The biblical Sarah — Abraham's wife — holds a strange double position. She is a victim of her husband's decisions, handed over to foreign rulers, silenced and controlled. But she is also, later in the story, the one who demands that Hagar and her son Ishmael be expelled into the desert. Perpetrator and victim, sometimes in the same breath. My project traces how this double identity has been received across centuries — in theology, literature, art, and politics — and what it tells us about how victimhood functions as an identity, not just a condition. The argument is that these two faces of Sarah are harder to separate than we would like to think, and that this discomfort is precisely what makes her such a revealing figure for our moment.
You also have a forthcoming book on Jephthah's daughter. Who is she?
She appears in eleven verses in the book of Judges, is never given a name, and walks into her own death with a composure that has haunted readers for centuries. Her father makes a rash vow to God — he will sacrifice whatever comes through his door first if he wins his battle — and she is the one who comes through the door. What strikes me about her story is not just the violence, but her response to it: she asks for two months in the mountains to "bewail her virginity" with her companions before she dies. There is something in that detail — the insistence on time, on female solidarity, on mourning before the end — that refuses to be tidied away. She has been haunting me for years, and the book is my attempt to understand why.
You founded a research group called "Gender, Scripture, and Psychoanalysis." How did that come about?
Somewhat organically, which is the polite way of saying it wasn't entirely planned. I kept finding that the conversations I most wanted to have — about gendered violence in the texts, about identification and projection, about what it does to a reader to encounter these stories — didn't fit neatly into existing frameworks. Biblical studies without the psychoanalytic lens felt incomplete. Psychoanalysis without the texts felt unmoored. So I gathered some people around a table and we started reading together: Jessica Benjamin alongside Genesis 16, Nancy Chodorow alongside the stories of Sarah and Hagar. It turns out this is a very good combination.
You organized a workshop last December at Stift Melk — a Benedictine monastery. Was that as atmospheric as it sounds?
Genuinely, yes — though perhaps not in the ways people imagine. We were in a perfectly normal conference room, I should clarify, before the mythology takes hold. But there was something quietly meaningful about being in a place that has served as a center of learning and intellectual life for nearly a thousand years. The Benedictine tradition has never separated faith from scholarship, and that spirit — the idea that knowledge is a form of human dignity worth protecting — felt very present as we spent two intensive days discussing how "gender" has become a weapon in the hands of those seeking to dismantle democratic institutions. Eight scholars from across Europe, urgent questions about authoritarianism and identity politics, a hybrid format accommodating colleagues from even further afield — and the monastery going about its day somewhere in the background. I found it oddly grounding. When you're in a space that has weathered a thousand years of political upheaval and kept its commitment to learning intact, the work feels both more serious and, somehow, less hopeless.
You have three children and a full research career. How do you manage?
With genuine commitment and a reasonable tolerance for imperfection. The honest answer is that it is a constant negotiation — between the time research needs and the time children need, between the focused quiet a monograph requires and the lively chaos of a Vienna apartment with three small people in it. I have taken parental leave after each child and returned each time to a field that moves fast and does not always wait. But I have also found that having children has made me a better researcher in certain ways — more attuned to questions of care, dependence, and vulnerability, which happen to be exactly what my work is about. I am not sure that is a coincidence.
What are you working on right now that excites you?
The Jephthah's daughter book is close to completion and close to my heart. Beyond that, I am increasingly drawn to the political theology dimension of my research: how anti-gender movements use sacrifice rhetoric, how victimhood identity gets mobilized on the political right, how the Bible gets recruited into projects its authors could not have imagined. After Melk, these questions feel more pressing than ever. It turns out there is no shortage of material — which is both the challenge and, in a strange way, the motivation.
Finally — what would you say to someone who thinks biblical scholarship is irrelevant to contemporary life?
I would say: watch the news for about ten minutes. Religious texts, gendered narratives, and the politics of sacrifice are not historical curiosities. They are active. They are being cited in parliaments, deployed in culture wars, and used to tell people who they are and what they owe. Understanding where those stories come from — and what they actually say, as opposed to what people claim they say — seems to me like one of the more useful things a person can do right now. The texts are also, for what it is worth, genuinely fascinating. But I will take the political urgency as my opening argument.