In 1985 Runia was awarded a C&C Huygens Post-doctoral Fellowship by the Dutch National Research Body Z.W.O. (later N.W.O.), enabling him to be a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton in 1986–87 and a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the
Australian National University in Canberra in 1987. In 1991 he was appointed De Vogel Professor Extraordinarius at the
Utrecht University, The Netherlands, a position that he held until 1999. In 1992, Runia was appointed to the Chair of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at
Leiden University. In 2002 he returned to Australia on his appointment as Master of
Queen's College at the
University of Melbourne, a position he held until retiring in 2016. He is currently a
Professorial fellow in the School of Historical Studies in the
Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. In March 2017 he was appointed Director of the
Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the
Australian Catholic University. He has also been a Professor Extraordinarius in the Department of Ancient Studies at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, since 2007. Runia was elected a
Fellow of the
Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1999 and a Correspondent of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. He was appointed a
Member of the Order of Australia in the
2025 Australia Day Honours. Runia's scholarship research has focused on two main areas: (1) the interaction of
Greek philosophy and Jewish-Christian thought, with particular attention paid to the contribution of the Hellenistic-Jewish author
Philo of Alexandria and (2) the genre of ancient
doxography, which gives us valuable information on the thought of early Greek philosophers. ==Publications==