Welcome to the Department of Religious Studies!
Ward is Reader in Biblical Cultures and European Thought and teaches on gods and government, and on the philosophy of religion.
Jeremy is Professor of Philosophy, Religion and Culture and teaches on a range of subjects including William James and psychoanalysis, ethics and mind. As Dean for Europe, Jeremy is also responsible for the University’s postgraduate centres: the Brussels School of International Studies and the Paris School of Arts and Culture.
Chris is Reader in Theology and Religious Studies and Head of the Department of Religious Studies. He teaches a range of topics including religion and film and Christianity in the modern world.
Leslie is a Lecturer in East Asian Studies, and a historian of medicine and religion in East Asia. His research interests include the history of medicine and religion in China, Vietnam and Japan, with a focus on cosmology, the body, self-cultivation and therapy. He teaches East Asian religions, philosophy, culture and medical humanities.
Lois is a Senior Research Fellow. Her current research interests centre on the nature of the existential in modernity, with an empirical focus on nonreligious populations. Her work engages with questions around the role of religious and nonreligious existential culture in public life. You can find out more about her work from her Think Kent lecture, which asks “Does religious unbelief exist?”
Gordon is the Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology and much of his work relates to the study of meaning and values in modern Western societies. Most recently, these have focused on histories of abuse involving religious organisations. His teaching normally covers religion in contemporary Britain, the sociology of religion, the cultural sociology of the sacred and research methods for the social and cultural study of religion.
Yvonne is Professor of Biblical Cultures and Politics and teaches a range of subjects at undergraduate level, including political theologies and blasphemy.