Prof. Dr. Jennifer Wasmuth did her undergraduate work in Protestant theology and Slavic studies. After a year of study at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in Russia she wrote her dissertation under Erlangen theologian Prof. Dr. Karl Christian Felmy. Pursuing the question of Protestant influences on Russian academic theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she analyzed the phenomenon of “liberal Orthodox theology.”
Following this, for many years she worked in close cooperation with Prof. Dr. Heinz Ohme, the Chair in Church and Confessional Studies and Eastern Church Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. She oversaw a project sponsored by the German Research Foundation to create a Russian-German theological dictionary. During this time she completed her habilitation on the meaning of the Nicene Creed in Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon’s writings.
Prof. Dr. Wasmuth is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hannover. For many years she has taken part in dialogue with Orthodox Christians, including the dialogue between the Protestant Church in Germany and the Moscow Patriarchate, and the dialogue between the Lutheran World Federation and the Eastern Orthodox churches.
From April 2018 - September 2021 she was Director of the Institute for Ecumenical Research, Strasbourg. As of October 2021, she is Chair of "Ecumenical Theology with special reference to Orthodox Christianity and its global impact in history and the present" at the Faculty of Theology.
A list of her publications (in German) can be seen here: Publications Jennifer Wasmuth