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 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 and early Christianity.
Her PhD project focuses on eschatological thinking in Manichaean and Gnostic texts in Coptic, Greek and Syriac. Gnostic and Manichaean worldview placed humanity in a certain cosmological constellation and salvific history, with consequences for thinking about human society and its relationships in social, political and spiritual sense. Both took on aspects of contemporary Hellenic and Judeo-Christian thinking, making them an interesting subject for the study of political thought at the crossroads of ancient and medieval history.
Justine's broader research interests include apocalypticism and eschatology, Gnostic traditions, Manichaeism, late antique religious and social history.
