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Sigurd Bergmann

Prof. Dr. Sigurd Bergmann

Carson Fellow

Trained in Göttingen, Germany, and Uppsala and Lund, Sweden, Sigurd Bergmann works as a professor for Religious studies in the Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Bergmann has conducted field work in the Sámi Arctic, Peruvian Andes, Aboriginal Australia, Mayan Yucatan, among others. He has published more than 250 books and articles since 1985, including an extensive monograph on Sámi visual arts and a number of Nordic anthologies on the themes of diaconia, power, autonomy, ordinary life culture, and pluralism. He is a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Letters and Sciences, as well as of several editorial boards, such as Blackwell Compass Religion/Christianity, Norsk Teologisk Tidskrift (Journal of Norwegian Theology) and Ecotheology: The Journal of Religion, Nature and the Environment.

In the 1990s, he worked as a secretary for the Nordic Forum of Contextual Theology and also initiated and founded the Institute of Contextual Theology in Lund. From 2002-2005, he participated in the Norwegian national research program on ‘Religion in the Age of Globalization.’ He co-directed the interdisciplinary research group on ‘Technical Spaces of Mobility’ from 2003-2007 and initiated the ‘European Forum on the Study of Religion and Environment’ 2005, when he convened the European Science Foundation’s (ESF) workshop on ‘Religion and the Environment in Europe,’ and he has chaired the Forum 2005-2011, cf. <http://www.hf.ntnu.no/relnateur/>.

His previous studies have investigated the relationship between the image of God and the view of nature in late antiquity, the methodology of contextual theology, visual arts in the indigenous Arctic and Australia, as well as visual arts, architecture, and religion in climate change. Ongoing projects focus on the amalgamation of ‘space and religion', and on the interactions of religion and dangerous environmental-and-climatic change.

RCC Research Project: Sacred Geography: Religion in the Lived Space of Climatic Change (pdf, 21 KB)

Film Interview with Sigurd Bergmann


Selected Publications:

  • Edited with D. Gerten. Religion in Global Environmental and Climate Change: Sufferings, Values, Lifestyles. London/New York: Continuum, 2011.
  • Raum und Geist: Zur Erdung und Beheimatung der Religion – Eine theologische Ästh/Ethik des Raums. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010.
  • In the Beginning Is the Icon: A Liberative Theology of Images, Visual Arts and Culture. London: Equinox, 2009.
  • Edited with T. Sager. The Ethics of Mobilities: Rethinking Place, Exclusion, Freedom and Environment. Farnham, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
  • Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.