Staff profile
Ricky Whitefield
Junior Research Fellow
Affiliation | Telephone |
---|---|
Junior Research Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion | +44 (0) 191 33 41210 |
Junior Research Fellow of St John's College | |
Advisory Board Member in the Centre for Death and Life Studies | |
Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing | |
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities | |
Postgraduate Fellow in the Institute for Medical Humanities |
Biography
After an initial B.A. degree in Theology at Durham (2014-18), I moved to Keble College, Oxford, to pursue an M.Phil. in Modern Theology (2018-2020), specialising in the theological reception of phenomenological discourses in the early-mid twentieth century, not least in the work of Paul Tillich (1886-1965). Displaced and disrupted by Covid-19 and its complications, I then returned to Durham to join the lay-monastic community of St Antony's Priory (2020-2022) during which I was also appointed as Junior Research Fellow and part-time teacher in the Department of Theology and Religion. After my time at St Antony's Priory, but continuing my JRF and teaching work, I embarked on a part-time M.A. in Social Anthropology at Durham. [Update this bio].
My current projects include:
- A book with Douglas Davies on ecology, memory, and British storytelling with new theoretical developments circling around an ethnographic case-study of the National Memorial Arboretum as a prime symbolic focus of British remembrance and for its self-awareness and self-narration.
- A four-volume collection with Mark Sandy et al on Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914, (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2025)
- Routledge Revivals edition on largely forgotten English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (1905-1985) also forthcoming 2025
- A chapter on ecologies of remembrance in Bomalaski, R., & Venters, A.M. (Eds.), Ritual Interventions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern Rites of Passage (Delaware: Vernon Press, forthcoming 2026).
- A chapter on the root-metaphor of the nation, with wider reflections on the nature of 'truth' as 'depth' -- also forthcoming 2026.
- Current discussions around a multivolume collection on 19th century reception and imagination of the subject (human and non-human), circling round emerging themes in my own work on mortality, mind, mystery and memory, and their intellectual, social, emotional, and material histories across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
[Add specific details to these and upload to publications list]