Leibniz Prize winner Michael Seewald joins LMU

In the summer semester of 2026, Professor Michael Seewald will take up a chair in dogmatic theology at the Faculty of Catholic Theology at LMU. In a sense, this marks a return for him: from 2009 to 2011, he completed his doctoral studies at LMU, where he habilitated in dogmatic theology and ecumenical theology in 2015.

Seewald was born in Saarbrücken in 1987. After studying theology, philosophy, and political science in Tübingen, Pune (India), and Frankfurt am Main, he completed his doctorate at LMU in 2011. After completing his habilitation in 2015, he was appointed to the Chair of Dogmatics and History of Dogma (W3) at the University of Münster in 2016, which he has held ever since. At the age of 29, he was one of the youngest professors in a humanities discipline in Germany. Since 2017, Seewald has been Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster, and since 2022 he has also been its spokesperson. In addition, Michael Seewald has been a full member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2023 and a permanent fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin since 2024.

“I am looking forward to working with my colleagues at LMU in the future. And I am looking forward to reflecting together with students on questions of the Christian faith, its development, and its contemporary significance.” Professor Seewald says.

Seewald's research focuses on theories of dogmatic development and reform debates in the Catholic Church, among other topics. His books have been translated into ten languages. His work “Dogma im Wandel” (Dogma in Transition) is considered a standard work on the history of dogma. Seewald's research has received numerous awards, including the Karl Rahner Prize for theological research and the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize from the DFG. In 2025, he received Germany's most prestigious science award, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, which is endowed with 2.5 million euros. At the award ceremony, Katja Becker, President of the DFG, praised Seewald's “virtuoso innovative power” and described his work as “groundbreaking.”