International Journal of Kierkegaard Research Vision
A specialist journal has everything to do with the paradox of community. To “upbuild” what is
there, the current field of study, supporting, nurturing, inspiring, promoting—but to do so
without drawing boundaries that exclude the surprising, the challenging, the different, and the
critical. The IJKR seeks to publish research that opens Kierkegaard’s texts anew for our “present
age.”
Kierkegaard conjured the single individual of modernity by appealing to his singular reader: his
impact on our empirical world would be difficult to overstate. To become a reader, for
Kierkegaard, is to be changed by the text: goaded—as by a Socratic gadfly—to a more earnest
responsibility. The IJKR aims to facilitate the back and forth of scholarly response and original
text, of scholarly conversation and dialogue, and of interplay between scholarship and the
demands of “actuality.” It hosts a virtual space in which writing on Kierkegaard questions and
invigorates our experience, and in turn, tests and inspires by what happens today.
With its roots in the Hong Kierkegaard Library, which supports students and scholars from
around the world in coming together and accessing resources for reading Kierkegaard, the new
Journal aims to provide a platform for the fruits of this research. Outstanding essays should be
available to others to read, and the IJKR aims to support scholars producing excellent work in a
way which is indexed and recognized by the broader academic community. This is the goal of
the Journal: to strengthen the field of Kierkegaard studies, from undergraduate students, through
established and already esteemed scholars, in such a way that “strengthening” might also mean
“opening,” and “broadening.”
In this spirit we solicit rigorous and imaginative essays from scholars in diverse fields, including
philosophy, religious studies, psychology, politics, literature, and those scholars working at the
intersection of disciplines: on the subject of Kierkegaard’s texts.
The Editors,
Anna Söderquist, Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, USA
Elizabeth Xiao-An Li, Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Frances Maughan-Brown, College of the Holy Cross, USA