Profile

I am a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent.

My approach to the study of religion draws on sociology, anthropology, cultural history and philosophy to explore the concepts and lived experience of meaning, ethics and knowledge in modern Western societies.

I am working on a three-year project entitled ‘The Faithful Child: Evangelicals and the Formation of Children in Modern Britain’. This seeks 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.

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Books

• (2012) Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility (Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell)
• (2011) co-edited with Gordon Lynch and Jolyon Mitchell, Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader (London, Routledge)

Articles

• (2013) ‘Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student’, forthcoming in Journal of Contemporary Religion, special issue on young people and the cultural performance of belief.
• (2012) ‘Latour, Prepositions and the Instauration of Secularism’, Political Theology, special issue ‘Speculative Philosophy and Religious Practices’, 13(2), pp. 200-16.
• (2011) ‘Religious language as poetry: Heidegger’s challenge’, The Heythrop Journal, 52(6), pp. 926-38.
• (2010) ‘A Religious Education Otherwise? An examination and proposed interruption of current British practice’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 44(1), pp. 23-44.
• (2010) ‘The obliteration of truth by management: Badiou, St Paul and the question of economic managerialism in education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, special issue ‘Alain Badiou: Becoming subject to education’, 42(2), pp. 230-50.
• (2009) ‘And who is my neighbour? Levinas and the commandment to love re-examined’, Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, 19(2), pp. 145-66.
• (2007) ‘Bringing me more than I contain: Discourse, Subjectivity and the Scene of Teaching’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 41(3), pp. 411-30.

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My research draws on sociology, anthropology, cultural history and philosophy to explore the place of religion in modern Western societies, relating that to wider questions about meaning, knowledge, ethics and modernity.

My first doctorate was a theoretical analysis of constructions of subjectivity in liberal and neoliberal educational cultures, drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s writing on ethics, religion and Jewish education to open up alternative understandings of education.

Following this, I decided to undertake a second doctorate to move into empirical research, developing my theoretical interests in morality, meaning-making and modernity through an ethnographic study of conservative evangelicals in London. This work focuses on issues of ethics, embodiment and everyday urban life, exploring the practical means by which individuals seek to shape their lives and actions according to an integrated Christian ideal, and how that process is experienced in a pluralist, metropolitan context. 

From October 2012, I will take up a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, based at the University of Kent, for a study entitled ‘The Faithful Child: Evangelicals and the Formation of Children in Modern Britain’.

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In 2012/13 I will be teaching on the ‘Sociology of Religion’ undergraduate module.

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