People

Dr Anna Strhan, Department of Sociology, Co-Director

Anna is a cultural sociologist whose research and teaching interests lie broadly in questions about ethics, meaning, and values in everyday social life. Her research and teaching explore the relations between religion, secularism, morality, and the politics of belonging across different social spaces, using qualitative methods. She has published widely on these themes, including her books, Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (Oxford University Press), The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press), and her co-authored book Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton University Press).

Dr Metin Koca, Department of Sociology, Co-Director

Metin’s research sits at the intersection of cultural studies and political sociology, focusing on cultural change, reproduction, and periods of contestation. Combining ethnographic and archival methods, he examines politics of difference, recognition, tolerance, and radicalisation. His work has been published in various journals, including Politics, Religion & Ideology and the Journal of Contemporary European Studies, as well as in edited volumes on European, Turkish and Middle Eastern politics. He is the author of Tracing Cultural Change in Turkey's Experience of Democratization (Routledge) and currently a British Academy International Fellow leading the project Nonversion: The Conversion of Young Turks to Non-Religion.

Dr Joanna Malone, Department of Sociology, Co-Director

Joanna is a research fellow at the University of York and is currently undertaking a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship called Living and Dying Well in Old Age: Spiritual Needs in a Non-Religious Future. Joanna is a qualitative researcher with an interest in the life-course, ageing, the intersection between religion, non-religion, and values within the shifting contours of religion in contemporary society. Joanna is also interested in changing forms of care in later life. Her work has been published in various journals including Religion and British Journal of Sociology of Education. She has an upcoming monograph published by Bloomsbury entitled Lived Experiences of Non-believing Older Adults: Changing Landscapes of Belief.

Alex Arthur-Hastie, Department of Sociology

Alex's research explores how Witch identities are practised, resourced and experienced by women in the UK today. It uses ethnographic methods and participant-directed photo elicitation in order to gain rich insights into the lived experiences of its participants. The project utilises this data to explore empowerment narratives in regard to contemporary witchcraft practice, as well as connected themes of neoliberalism, consumption, racism and re-narrativisation. Alex also currently serves as Events Officer for the British Sociological Association's Sociology of Religion Study Group. 

Dr Asha Abeyasekera, Centre for Women's Studies

Asha's scholarship focuses on gender, ethics, and practices of intimacy and care, and their relations with religion and culture in South Asian societies, especially Buddhist ethics and ontology. Her research methods combine ethnography with life-histories and narratives of personal experience. As a feminist anthropologist, she is specifically interested in how agency is negotiated and subjectivities are formed, especially how aspirations for the ‘modern’ structure women’s emotions, configure their intimate relations, and shape expressions of the self.

Prof. Colin Campbell, Department of Sociology

Colin's work explores broad questions of cultural change in western societies. His work spans a range of issues in the field of religion, spirituality and culture, including the New Age and neo-Pagan movements, cults and the cultic milieu, superstition, the occult, secularization, rationalization and theodical change, and the study of non-believers, atheism and agnosticism. He has published widely in these fields, including his books Toward a Sociology of Irreligion, The Easternization of the West, and The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism.

Dr Peter Gardner, Department of Sociology

Pete's work focuses on the sociology of climate and ecological breakdown, transnational environmental social movements and protest, climate crises in post-conflict societies, and the criminalisation and repression of activism. This work intersects with religion and spirituality in three ways: first, and most broadly, in the intersections between decolonial ecologies, multi-species and more-than-human theory, and dark green religiosity; second, in analysing the role of Islam in flood- and conflict-affected northwestern Pakistan; and, third, in the spiritual dimension of activist experiences of climate protest, arrest, and imprisonment.

Dr Christine Jackson-Taylor, Department of Sociology

Christine is a qualitative researcher whose interests include gender, sexuality, identity, faith and lived religion. Her PhD thesis explores the lived experiences of LGBTQ women who have faith or religion. Using narrative methodologies her research uncovers the dynamic ways that notions of ‘comforts’ and ‘conflicts’ influence the ways identity is created, negotiated and lived. Her use of narrative brings a nuanced and relational focus to the field, and she demonstrates the significance of underexplored intersections of sexuality and gender within considerations of lived religion.

Dr Gareth Millington, Department of Sociology

Gareth is an urban sociologist. He currently leads a Leverhulme-funded five-year project titled ‘Archiving the Inner City: Race and the Politics of Urban Memory’. The project involves fieldwork in London, Paris and Philadelphia. Gareth is also working on a British Academy/ GCRF project based in Lagos, titled ‘Pneuma-city’: Frictional Infrastructure, road ecologies and valorisation of end-of-life tyres in Lagos’. He has recently finished work on a British Academy/ GCRF funded project titled ‘Religious Urbanization in Africa’, which examines how urban infrastructures such as energy, roads, bridges, homes, schools, universities and hospitals are increasingly being provided by religious organisations, especially Pentecostal churches. This study is based in Lagos and Kinshasa. 

Dr Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, Department of Sociology

Aurélien is an Honorary Fellow at the Department of Sociology at York, where he did, as a Senior Research Associate, fieldwork for the Archiving the Inner City Project on the Paris neighbourhoods of Château rouge and La Goutte d’or (Paris area). He is also a Senior Scholar at the Groupe Société Religion Laïcité (GSRL-CNRS) of Sorbonne University (France). His research discusses the intersection of religion, race and migration and in the African diaspora in France. His latest research is among Black Jews in France, in which he has published several articles on the topic, and a book which was published in 2024 at Lexington Books/Fortress Academic.

Dr Irteza Mohyuddin, Department of Sociology

Irteza is an Honorary Fellow in the Sociology Department, and recently competed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania. This postdoc was funded through the Leverhulme Trust’s Archiving the Inner City Project (led by Dr Gareth Millington). 

During the postdoc and in previous research, Irteza examined how Black Muslim youth in the Philadelphia public schools drew on their understandings of Islam, blackness, and ethnic identity in the process of crafting their identities. Irteza’s wider interests include exploring how history shapes our present experiences and cultural memory.

Dr Lucy Potter, Department of Sociology

Lucy is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, specialising in forced migration and non-religion. She holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield.

Her doctoral thesis, 'Blasphemy and Apostasy in the UK Asylum System,' explored the asylum claims of apostate refugees - individuals facing persecution for leaving their religion. Her research examines how asylum bureaucracies shape apostate identities and how colonial perspectives influence the assessment of non-religiosity.

She continues to focus on this topic in her postdoctoral work, with an interest in non-religious identities, lived religion and (de)coloniality.

Dr Sarah Qidwai, Department of Sociology

Sarah is currently working with Prof Amanda Rees on the Narratives of Science and Theology project. She is a Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar working on transnational and local perspectives of various scientific disciplines during the long nineteenth century. Her research specialities and teaching interests include the history of science and religion, British Imperialism in the long nineteenth century, science and colonialism, South Asian studies, the relationship of science and Islam, and the history of evolutionary biology.

Prof. Amanda Rees, Department of Sociology

Amanda is a historian of science. She specialises in the history of field sciences, especially ethology and ecology, in the history of human-animal relationships, and in the history of the future. She has spent the past five years researching the way that different narratives of science have been used to create different versions of the human future, and on the crucial role that religion has played in both the history of science and science fiction.

Dr Katy Sian, Department of Sociology

The main thrust of Katy's scholarship is focused on critical race theory, post/decoloniality and anti-foundationalism. She has also conducted research and published in the fields of Sikh Muslim conflict in the global Sikh diaspora, and critical Sikh studies. Her work contributes to broadening understandings of the political through an examination of the interconnections between racism, Islamophobia and colonialism. Katy is active in the community around anti-racism issues and her research continues to involve her within conversations across third sector and interfaith organizations.

Ruth Vassilas, Department of Sociology

Ruth is a PhD researcher studying psychosocial-spiritual transformations and lived spirituality. She investigates how people integrate spiritually transformative experiences (such as near-death, psychedelic, and Kundalini experiences) into their lives in Euro-American contexts and how such experiences reshape identity, wellbeing, faith and belonging over time. During her PhD, Ruth has been teaching in both the Department of Sociology and York Law School (she is a US-qualified lawyer), and she has served as President of York’s Drug Science Society. Her passion lies in exploring the mechanisms of personal and collective change.

Dr Matthew Williams, School of Arts and Creative Technologies

Matthew Williams is a musicologist whose research explores the intersections of popular music, religion, spirituality and meaning-making. His current book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, examines gospel stylisation in popular culture and its meanings. He has published articles and chapters with Routledge and OUP, as well as in Religions, and regularly presents at international conferences in ethnomusicology, popular music studies, and religious studies. His work contributes to conversations about lived religion, the construction of sacred–secular boundaries, and the role of music in spiritual and cultural identities.

Prof. Robin Wooffitt, Department of Sociology

Robin is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology. Using conversation analytic techniques, he examines the relationship between language, interaction and exceptional human experiences. He is the author of Telling Tales of the Unexpected (1992), The Language of Mediums and Psychics (2006), Making Sense of the Paranormal: The Interactional Construction of Unexplained Experiences (2021, with Rachael Ironside) and Everyday Telepathy (2026). He is currently working on a book exploring everyday poetics in accounts of anomalous experiences.