About
My Story
Dr. Borja Vilallonga, Ph.D. (known also by his pen name, Boaz Vilallonga) is a historian of religion at the University of Newcastle. He earned his Ph.D. at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris, with a dissertation devoted to the religious and intellectual origins of the Spanish and Catalan nationalist movements in the nineteenth century. Borja has built his academic career in the United States, at Columbia University and New York University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. His research focuses on the study of the crossroads of religion and modernity.
In the last years, Borja has been combining his scholarly work with the private sector. He has been working on analytical linguistics and market analysis. He currently is a partner at Descaus & Co., a hedge fund in New York, and he is part of Demian Media, an analytics and marketing firm specialized in digital advertising and linguistic data and semantic fields analysis. Borja speaks 10 languages, 5 at the native level.
In parallel, Borja has been published in the main newspapers and media outlets in Catalonia, as well as several American and Israeli media. He has been a regular op-ed contributor in Diari Ara and El Nacional, besides leading the Catalan weekly magazine El Temps, succeeding at its digital transition.
Academic Research
Borja has spent 9 years conducting research in history of religion at leading French and American institutions. After the completion of the PhD at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) when he was 26, Borja stayed in Paris as associate research fellow at the EHESS. In 2014, with the generous support of the Tikvah Fund, he started his postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, where he worked under the guidance of Professors Samuel Moyn and Mark Lilla. There, he devised his current research project focusing on how Catholics engaged in a modernization crusade during the nineteenth century that entirely transformed Catholic dogma and pious practices.
In 2015, Borja joined the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. During his time at NYU, Borja began devoting more time to his writing and to the private sector. After leaving NYU in 2017, Borja decided to have an academic hiatus, before rejoining Columbia University in 2018, with a position at the Department of Classics.
Borja decided not to renew with Columbia University in 2019. He now splits his time between New York and his home in Catalonia. In 2021 he joined the University of Newcastle to continue his scholarly work as a visiting researcher. He devotes his time to his two entrepreneurial ventures as well.
Beyond academia, Borja’s interests in psychoanalysis have brought him to train in psychoanalysis at the Contemporary Freudian Society in New York.
Lastly, as an oddity, Borja indeed has a coat-of-arms.