Research projects

Research projects at the School of Divinity are centres of excellence for their subjects.

Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India (DiMuse)

Dr Arkotong Longkumer and Professor Clare Harris from the University of Oxford have received an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant for a 4-year research project on the Gaidinliu collection.

This project will show how the Gaidinliu collection needs to be rethought, reframed, and challenged. It will also raise more significant questions regarding digital repatriation, ownership, and knowledge production. It will involve several activities – a film documentary, a graphic novel, and a bespoke online exhibition with 3-D objects curated onto a website.

Overcoming Communist Violence: Towards A Constructive Chinese Public Theology in Dialogue with Karl Bath

Dr Luke Li was awarded the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2023 for their two-year project on Communist violence. The institutional violence displayed by the Chinese Communist regime and integral to its revolutionary practice and discourse presents a pressing case for the study of Christian ethics. This project will be the first one to develop a public-theological response to Communist violence, in dialogue with Karl Barth. Interweaving interdisciplinary approaches of moral theology and philosophy, Li will chart a promising vision of Chinese public theology in the context of extreme violence and articulate its significance for a fresh understanding of Barth’s ethics of nonviolent love.

God, Language, and Diversity: Spiritual Flourishing in Neurodiverse and Multilingual Communities

Dr James Eglinton and Dr Thomas Bak (School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences) have received funding from the John Templeton Foundation for their project which investigates whether bilingualism make any difference to an individual person’s moral reasoning? An important area of growth in cognitive linguistics, the moral foreign language effect (MFLE) has shown that a bilingual person’s moral judgements often vary according to the particular language in use. While studies of MFLE have proliferated in recent years, Bak and Eglington will be the first to explore the place of religion or spiritual formation in this effect. 

table {mso-displayed-decimal-separator:"\."; mso-displayed-thousand-separator:"\,";} tr {mso-height-source:auto;} col {mso-width-source:auto;} td {padding-top:1px; padding-right:1px; padding-left:1px; mso-ignore:padding; color:black; font-size:11.0pt; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; text-decoration:none; font-family:Calibri, sans-serif; mso-font-charset:0; text-align:general; vertical-align:bottom; border:none; white-space:nowrap; mso-rotate:0;} .xl237 {font-size:12.0pt; text-align:left; border-top:.5pt solid black; border-right:none; border-bottom:none; border-left:none;} .xl238 {font-size:12.0pt; text-align:left; border-top:.5pt solid black; border-right:.5pt solid black; border-bottom:none; border-left:none;}

Interdisciplinary Interpretations Of Multiple Testimonies Of Female Physicians In Auschwitz 

Professor Hannah Holtschneider has been awarded the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant for their project exploring the testimonies of a number of female Auschwitz survivors who worked as slave labourers in the infirmary at Auschwitz-Birkenau (Lucie Adelsberger, Władysława Jasińska, Ella Lingens, Gisella Perl). Her work advances previous studies of women’s experiences during the Holocaust by focusing on female professionals from different cultural and linguistic contexts who were enlisted in specific slave labour because of their medical qualifications. This project addresses one of the most intriguing, but still under-researched, aspects of testimony: how the remembering and telling of survivors experiences during the Holocaust changes through time, through shifting contexts and with increasing age. 

‘Good health and well-being’ through attending to knowledge at the intersection of faiths and healing practices in East-Central Africa

Professor Emma Wild-Wood has been awarded a Collaboration Grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh for an interdisciplinary and institutional collaboration project which will convene stakeholders in Malawi and Uganda to investigate the intersection of faiths with health practices and scope a larger project. The chances of achieving ‘good health and well-being of all’ (United Nations’ third Sustainable Development Goal) are improved by decolonising knowledge about faith and health and contextualising health choices. East-Central Africa has a public and varied religious landscape and is familiar with outbreaks of disease. A range of healing practices – biomedical, herbal, spiritual – have a faith component. Yet the operation of religious belief and practice on health is often ignored, instrumentalised or deemed obstructive in developmental interventions. This collaboration develops cross-disciplinary approaches and centres the epistemologies of faith and health practitioners.

Carceral Theology and Prison Literature in Egypt

Dr Walaa Quisay was awarded the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship in 2022 for a three-year project that seeks to examine the development of Islamist religious ideology in Egypt through the study of carceral theology. While the foundational literature of the Islamist movement was mostly produced in prison, the relationship between the prison system and political theology has been severely understudied. Relying mainly on qualitative methods, this project studies how political prisons in Egypt impact the formations of political theology, ideology, and religious practice with particular attention to gender, class, and generational difference. In doing so, it will deepen the understanding of Muslim political theologies, Islamist movements, and the nature of carceral states in the Middle East.

The Psychology and Theology of Faith

Dr Bethany Sollereder was awarded a grant from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota who (with generous support from the John Templeton Foundation) are hosting an academic cross-training program in the psychological sciences for scholars of Christian theology or philosophy of religious with research interests relating to religious belief or religious commitment. As part of a team of eight, Dr Sollereder will work with mentors from the psychological sciences to engage in a 2-year intensive study, in order to apply and leverage insights from the psychological sciences in their work as theologians and philosophers. 

Nationalism and Ecology: Women’s participation and the Hindu-right in the India-Bangladesh Borderland

Dr Sneha Roy was awarded the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2022 for a three-year project that seeks to identify and understand the ways in which women of the Hindu-right/Hindutva organisation (Samaj Seva Bharati Pashchim Banga) conceptualise religious nationalism to interact with and navigate the politics of ecology in the Sundarbans, a tempestuous borderland region between India and Bangladesh. Hindu nationalists mediate between ‘saffron’ (symbolising Hindutva) and ‘green’ (symbolising ecology) politics to participate in environmental protection, which are locally demonstrated but are subsumed under the agenda of national identity. This examines how the women model their interpretations of Hindu nationalism to organise their responses around environmental crises.

Thinking The Future Of Money In The Humanities

Professor Rachel Muers received a Royal Society of Edinburgh Networking Grant to gather researchers who are asking questions about the cultural and societal life of money - in religion, in history, in the arts, in cross-cultural contexts, in relation to larger frameworks of value and meaning - and brings their insights to bear on questions of the future of money. By exploring alternative meanings and representations of money from the past and from across cultures, the network will uncover new resources for rethinking and reimagining money at this time of rapid change - focusing on responding to the environmental emergency and the challenges of cashlessness. 

Governmateriality of Indigenous Religion(s) 

Dr Arkotong Longkumer is involved in the GOVMAT research. It is a multi-national project led by UiT, the Arctic University of Norway. It aims to explore the influence of indigenous religions in different settings across the world today: in local communities, at certain international events, and in a range of diverse exchanges – social media, journalism, art, education, politics, law, environmentalism, and tourism.

The work will build on foundations laid by a related project, Indigenous Religion(s): Local Grounds, Global Networks (INREL).

See: GOVMAT

 

This article was published on