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Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
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]