About

Research and Teaching in the Critical Study of Religion

Welcome to my website.

I am a scholar of religion with wide-ranging interests that include religion and violence, slavery, Christian origins, apocalypticism, terrorism, magic, and religious anarchism. I am also fascinated by the reception of Islam in the early modern Anglophone world and somewhat obsessed with earliest Quakerism and Unitarianism.

In addition, I have an abiding interest in the critical study of the lived religion of millenarian movements today and the challenges they face. Broadly speaking, I am a historian who draws extensively on methods from religious studies and is open to any approach that can help us better understand the complexities of religion, both past and present.

I am currently Professor of the Study of Religion in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Wolfson College. I have also been a Visiting Researcher at the Institutionen för etnologi, religionshistoria och genusvetenskap Stockholms universitet since 2012.

I established and currently coordinate the MPhil Pathway in Religion and Conflict in the Faculty of Divinity and also oversee the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements that I helped found in 2015.

I also supervise postgraduates in all my areas of research interest — ancient, early modern, and contemporary — and am always happy to talk to prospective students.

Alongside my teaching and research, I am an advocate of open-access scholarly publishing, especially diamond open access, in which books and articles are made freely available in electronic form at no cost to authors, their institutions, or readers. It can and should be done!

On a personal note, I was married to Melanie Jane Wright (1970–2011), who was, among many other things, a scholar of modern Judaism and a pioneer in the study of religion and film. You can find her work here.

Finally, I should emphasise that I care a great deal about the public understanding of religion and the need to foster a critical and informed approach to its various forms today. So, if you think I can be of help, do contact me.

Contact

You can contact me at jjm1000@cam.ac.uk.