Religious Studies/Study of Religions

Specialise in contemporary, historical or thematic research in areas such as Asian Studies, History of Religions/New Religions, and Jewish Studies.

Research profile

You can specialise in a variety of areas which include contemporary and historical topics and fields such as Afrodiasporic Religiosity and Decolonial Approaches to Religion, Asian Religions, History of Religions/New Religions and Jewish Studies.

You will be encouraged to frame your research using a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, from the classic to the cutting-edge. You will be able to draw on methodological expertise which includes biographical analysis, discourse analysis, ethnography, historical and textual studies, memory studies and narrative studies.

You are encouraged to contact a potential supervisor to discuss your research project before making a formal application

Afrodiasporic Religiosity/Decolonial approaches

While we welcome proposals on a wide-range of topics within the field of Afrodiasporic religiosity and decolonial approaches to religion our own expertise lies primarily in the following key areas:

Gender and Sexuality
Creole spiritual practices of the Caribbean and Latin America
Race, racialisation and identity
Religion as a tool for/of (neo)colonial control as well as a means of self-determination and community building
Histories of conquest, enslavement and colonialism shaping religion
The politics and economics of religiosity
Spirits, ancestors, and the dead
Embodied, affective and sensorial components of religious practice

History of Religions/New Religions

We welcome proposals on a wide-range of topics in new and alternative forms of religion and spirituality, combining empirical enquiry with theoretical and comparative analysis. Our own expertise lies primarily in the following key areas:

New and alternative religion/s combining empirical enquiry with theoretical and comparative analysis
History and ethnography of the categories ‘spirituality’, ‘holistic’, ‘new age’
Atheists, humanists and the rejection of religion
Discourses on ‘religion’ in civil society and transnational contexts
Modern history of the study of religion/s
Philosophy of the comparative study of religion/s

Asian Religions

While we welcome proposals on a wide-range of topics within the field of Asian Religions, our own expertise lies primarily in the following key areas:

The intersections between indigenous religions, Hinduism and local Christianities in South and Southeast Asia
The ethnographic study of South Asia, with particular expertise in Northeast India and the Himalayan region
The intersection between religion, politics and nationalism in Asia
Religious narrative in early India, Hindu epics, Buddhist and Jain narrative
Buddhism in India and Buddhist literature in Sanskrit
Theravada Buddhism, including Pali literature

Jewish Studies

The Religious Studies Subject Area welcomes proposals on a wide range of topics in Jewish Studies, and our own expertise primarily lies in the following areas: