Dr Brian Klug

Honorary Fellow in Social Philosophy

brian.klug@campion.ox.ac.uk

About

Brian Klug is Honorary Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford. He was formerly Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford. He is Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton, and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences at St Xavier University, Chicago, where for several years he was Chair of the Philosophy Department. He has been Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, DePaul University, Chicago, and in the School of Humanities, Southampton University. In 2012, he was Visiting Scholar at the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia (Adelaide), where he taught ‘Wittgenstein on Culture and Religion’.

He is an Associate Editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Advisory Boards for ‘Communities of Inquiry’ ((SOAS, University of London); ‘Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway’ (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies); ‘Political and Public Theologies’ (book series, Brill); Islamophobia Studies Yearbook; and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies.

He has participated in two projects of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue (an Austrian think tank): ‘The Vienna Conversations’ (on “the missing sense of togetherness in Europe”) and ‘Arab-Jewish Engagement’ (ongoing).

Research Interests

In much of his work, Dr Klug addresses the messiness of our talk about race, ethnicity, religion and prejudice, with an eye to questions about justice, human rights and political belonging. Reflecting his academic degrees in Philosophy (London) and Social Thought (Chicago), he takes philosophy across disciplinary boundaries into neighbouring fields in the humanities and social sciences.

He has long been engaged in initiatives to promote Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim understanding. He is currently working on philosophy of religion, with a special focus on Judaism. This overlaps with his extensive work on antisemitism, Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

His breadth of research interests has led to a wide variety of invited academic lectures, for example: ‘”If I forget thee, O Jerusalem”: The use and abuse of Jewish memory’ (The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard); ‘The god and the gadfly: A reading of Plato’s Apology’ (Faculty of Catholic Theology, Vienna); ‘Grammar from Heaven: The language of revelation in light of Wittgenstein’ (Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies).

Past public speaking engagements include a lecture at the Jewish Museum Berlin marking the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht and Holocaust Memorial Day lectures at Cambridge, Oxford and elsewhere. He has taken part in a number of BBC radio religious affairs programmes, and has been interviewed for several video and audio productions (e.g., ‘100 years after Balfour’). Dr Klug is one of the drafters of the ‘Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism’ (2021), written under the auspices of the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem.

Selected Publications

Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (editor), Notting Hill Editions, 2015

Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life, Vallentime Mitchell, 2011

A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (co-editor), Verso, 2008

Children as Equals: Exploring the Rights of the Child (co-editor), Univerity Press of America, 2002

Ethics, Value and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai (co-editor), Athlone Press, 1977

Chapters and essays in numerous multi-authored volumes. Forthcoming: ‘Defining antisemitism: What is the point?’, in Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023