A new book by Dr Anna Strhan, a new Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies, has been published by Wiley-Blackwell. Levinas, Subjectivity Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility explores how the philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas lead us to reassess education and reveal the possibilities of a radical new understanding of ethical and political responsibility. Strhan explains that the book offers an original analysis of constructions of subjectivity in liberal and neoliberal educational cultures, drawing on Levinas’s writings on ethics, religion, and Jewish education to open up new understandings of education and moral responsibility, and developing alternative approaches to religious education and interreligious dialogue.
Strhan’s Early Career Fellowship, awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, will allow her to undertake a new three-year research project, from October 2012, entitled, ‘The Faithful Child: Evangelicals and the Formation of Children in Modern Britain’. This will build on both her research on religion and education and her recent study of the everyday religious lives of British evangelicals. The Trust’s website states that “Early Career Fellowships aim to provide career development opportunities for those who are at a relatively early stage of their academic careers but with a proven record of research”. The Trust aims to help budding researchers to develop their research and progress in their career by providing financial support equivalent to 50% of their salary costs in conjunction with the institution they are employed by, in this case, the University of Kent. Strhan’s new project will seek to examine the significance of childhood and parenting in British evangelicalism in different contexts ranging from everyday family and church life, formal and informal educational contexts, to wider public debates about childhood and education concerned with the place of religion and secularity in contemporary society.
We would like to congratulate Dr Strhan on her fantastic achievement, and are sure that she will continue to have a successful career in Religious Studies research and teaching.