Religion

Encouraging wider debate, changing perceptions, forging new frontiers.

Our respected academics are pushing boundaries across and beyond the discipline to make lasting impact on public knowledge about religions in history and wider society.

We’re researching across a fascinating range of fields, including historical religions reaching from the Mediterranean to East Asia, while the acclaimed Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK is the leading institution for sociological research on the different aspects of Muslim communities in the UK.

We continue to challenge conventional knowledge boundaries and to reflect and analyse contemporary debates about religion and cultural transmission in historical and transnational contexts.

To make important religious texts more widely known and understood our academics have published complete translations and studies of both the Harivaṃśa, the appendix to the great Indian epic Mahābhārata, and the Nestorian stele of Xi’an, an important document of the medieval Christian church in China.

We also collaborate with our colleagues in Archaeology and History to achieve a better and deeper understanding of the development of the religious traditions we study.