Cornelia Horn

Cornelia Bernadette Horn (born October 14, 1968) is a German-US-American theologian, historian and philologist who specializes in the study of Early Christianity and pre-modern Christianity with a focus on Southwestern Asia and Northeastern Africa, also known as Oriental Christianity.

Her work has examined theological, cultural, and historical questions in the areas of history, philology, art, childhood, women, and health in Early Christianity and specifically in the churches of Northeast Africa, the Middle East, and the Caucasus.

Her work has dealt with Christian Apocrypha and the transmission history of traditions across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, including the question of Christian apocryphal sources in the Quran and early Islam.

Cornelia Horn was born in Hardheim to Christa (born Teichmann) and Johann Albert Horn and grew up on the family farm in Steinbach, Main-Tauber-Kreis, Baden-Württemberg, the oldest of three children.

Upon completing her Abitur at the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Gymnasium in Wertheim am Main, she studied classical philology, theology, philosophy, Oriental Christian languages, Church history, art History, and computer-aided linguistic text analysis in Germany (University of Würzburg), Liechtenstein, the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the University of Texas at Austin.

In 2001 she received a PhD from the Catholic University of America with a thesis on the life and theology of 5th century bishop, ascetic, and theologian Peter the Iberian, under the supervision of Sidney H. Griffith.

From 2004 to 2012, Horn was an assistant professor at Saint Louis University.

Horn was awarded her cumulative habilitation in 2011 at the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen under Professor Stephen Gerö with work on literary, cultural, and historical questions on women and children from the Christian Orient and work on the reception of Peter the Iberian in the context of Palestinian Christianity and Christianity in the Caucasus.

In 2013, Horn received a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to continue her research at both the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Regensburg.

In 2014, the German Research Foundation awarded Horn a heisenberg Scholarship through the Heisenberg Programme and she continued her work at the FU Berlin.

On September 20, 2016, a jury in the City of Saint Louis, Missouri found Saint Louis University had denied her tenure illegally, having discriminated against her on the basis of her gender.

The German Research Foundation, in cooperation with the Martin Luther University, transferred this Heisenberg Scholarship to a Heisenberg Professorship for Languages and Cultures of the Christian Orient at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg on October 1, 2016, and in 2019, this professorship was incorporated into the university's permanent structure.

Since then she has been the Professor of Languages and Cultures of the Christian Orient and is the Chair of Oriental Christian and Byzantine Studies at the Department of the Christian Orient and Byzantium at the Oriental Institute of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU).

From April 1, 2017, to March 31, 2021, she was managing director of the Oriental Institute at MLU.

Since January, 2023 she is the director of the [Mesrop Center for Armenian Studies, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.

She is an external member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig.

Horn is married and is the mother of two children.

She resides in Berlin, Germany.

She is active in the Roman Catholic parish of St. Konrad in Schöneberg.