Justine De Rouck is a PhD researcher within the ERC-funded project New Polities. Political Thought in the First Millennium, led by Prof. Peter Van Nuffelen.
She studied History at the University of Ghent (UGent) where she obtained a B.A. in 2023 and M.A. in 2024. Her master’s thesis, supervised by prof. dr. Peter Van Nuffelen, focused on the epigraphic evidence for God-fearers in late antique Asia Minor as part of a broader phenomenon of religious boundary-crossing grounded in urban social life. In 2025 she obtained a B.A. in Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) working on apocalyptic intermediary figures in Second Temple Judaism.
Her PhD project explores political thought in Gnostic and Manichaean traditions of late antiquity. Gnostic and Manichaean worldview placed humanity in a different cosmological constellation and history, with consequences for thinking about human society and its relationships in social, political and spiritual sense. Both traditions took on aspects of contemporary Hellenic and Judeo-Christian thinking, making them an interesting subject for the study of political thought in the crossroads of ancient and medieval history.
Justine's research interests include religious and social history, apocalypticism, Gnostic and Manichaean traditions, late antique religious history.
