Hildebrand Project

Summer Residency

The Residency was launched in 2017 to support and expand the academic community devoted to the thought of Dietrich von Hildebrand and the tradition of Christian personalism broadly. We do this by enabling students and scholars to work alongside our Senior Scholars—former students of Dietrich von Hildebrand and/or John Paul II—and Associated Scholars, who are doing new and important work in personalist scholarship. In this way, we seek to pass the flame to future generations who will continue to reveal Hildebrand and personalism within the perennial Christian tradition.

During this summer residency, participants will explore the major texts of Dietrich von Hildebrand and personalism, closely reading alongside our Senior Scholars, each of whom was a student of either Dietrich von Hildebrand or Karol Wojtyła. The residency culminates with the ability for scholars to present their own work—dissertation chapters, conference papers, or graduate theses—and receive guidance from the Senior Scholars and other participants to hone their ideas, resulting in papers that will stand up to high-level academic scrutiny.

join the Summer 2024 SUMMER Residency

Senior Scholars

Senior Scholar

John F. Crosby
Senior Scholar

Rocco Buttiglione
Senior Scholar

Josef Seifert
Senior Scholar

John F. Crosby

Franciscan University of Steubenville

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Personalism, John Henry Newman, John Paul II, Dietrich von Hildebrand

Prof. Crosby was himself a student of Dietrich Hildebrand. Besides writing major studies on the thought of John Henry Newman, Max Scheler, and Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, and making his own contributions to personalist philosophy, Prof. Crosby has devoted his long and distinguished academic career—first at the University of Dallas, then at the International Academy of Philosophy, and currently at Franciscan University of Steubenville—to introducing his students to the intellectual legacy of Hildebrand, and also to making Hildebrand better known in scholarly circles. Prof. Crosby was the translator of the English edition of  Hildebrand’s philosophical masterpiece, The Nature of Love, and he also serves as the General Editor of all our present and future translations of Hildebrand’s works.

Senior Scholar

Rocco Buttiglione

A trusted collaborator of Pope St. John Paul II, and is an authority on his philosophical anthropology. His book Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man who became Pope John Paul II is a fundamental work on the pope’s early philosophy. A member of the Italian Parliament for over two decades, he serves on the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and holds the John Paul II Chair for Philosophy and History of European Institutions at the Lateran University in Rome. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Hildebrand Project.

Senior Scholar

Josef Seifert

Professor Seifert received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Salzburg in 1969 and, under Professor Robert Spaemann, his habilitation from the University of Munich (Privatdozent) in 1975. He studied chiefly under Balduin Schwarz, the most distinguished German former student of Dietrich von Hildebrand, at the University of Salzburg, and under Gabriel Marcel in Paris. Already as a child (from age 3 on) he knew Hildebrand personally, because Seifert’s mother had been a student of Hildebrand in Munich and both of his parents were Hildebrand’s friends. He is the author of many books, and Europe’s leading student and teacher of Hildebrand’s philosophy.

Eligibility

The Residency is an intensive program for advanced students and professional scholars who are working on MA theses, PhD dissertations, habilitations, books, chapters, or scholarly articles principally focused on Hildebrand or in some way substantively engaged with his thought (for example, a dissertation chapter focused on Hildebrand). We are especially interested in supporting novel research that has never been publicly presented.

We recognize that many universities do not have faculty with expertise on Hildebrand (or other personalists, too) and that this may prevent some students from writing an MA or dissertation on Hildebrand. The Residency exists to overcome this obstacle.

The Residency is not limited to those working exclusively on Hildebrand. We welcome applications from students and scholars working on kindred spirits, like Karol Wojtyla and Edith Stein, on great figures in the tradition, like Aristotle and Aquinas, or on any thinker or set of issues, provided that the work in progress includes Hildebrand as a substantive interlocutor and/or meaningfully engages the personalist tradition.

Dietrich von Hildebrand sitting in office reading a paper

Summer 2023 Residency