Centre for Religion and History

The Centre for Religion and History of the School of Theology, Philosophy and History at St Mary's University College was set up in 2006. The Centre emerged from, and built on the work carried out by, St Mary’s Centre for Religious History which provided, until 2006, a focus for historical research in the School.

The School has active researchers in the areas of history, theology, religion and politics and philosophy, religious history, international history, history and culture of the Middle East, Ottoman history, modern British history and both early modern and modern European history.

Mission, Aims and Objectives  

Increasing the range and quality of scholarship in history (especially in religion and history) is one of the prime objectives of the Centre. Other aims included:

  • Expanding history-based projects in the School and promoting interdisciplinary research
  • Promoting research and scholarship on religion and history and encouraging historical research that is objective and based on a range of sound methodologies
  • Applying for external funding to support historical research within the School and College
  • Attracting research students to the School
  • Supporting current and future Masters’ programmes in the School
  • Strengthening collaborative research with other British educational and research institutions
  • Organizing guest lectures, workshops, conferences, symposia, exchanges, film showings, arts exhibitions and other events
  • Encouraging inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches to research and publications on religion and history
  • Serving as a forum for cross-religious meetings to exchange ideas and to promote interfaith dialogue

The School also has its own programme of regular research seminars which, among other things, covers various areas of religion and history, and at which both staff and postgraduate members of the School present their work. The existence of the Tablet Archives in the School benefits hugely scholars and postgraduate students working on modern Catholic history, both in Britain and internationally.

The Centre benefits from the fact that the published historical output of the School is considerable, with a large number of monographs, textbooks, edited collections and journal articles published in recent years. Furthermore the Research Assessment Exercise RAE results for 2008 have rated 75% of the submissions made by the School to be either 'World Leading' or of 'International Standing'. 95% of the works published by over a dozen staff of the school met the exacting standards of the subject panel with the result that St Mary's is now a sector leader among Church Colleges in theological research.

Furthermore much of the current research in the School is focused on history-based projects such as the Holy Land Research Project (HLRP), which was set up in 2001. The work now done in the Holy Land Research Project has attracted funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (formerly AHRB) in recent years and a number of further applications for external grants are proceeding.

In 2006 the HLRP also attracted funding from the British Academy for co-organisng (in 2007) two workshops, one in London and the other at Birzeit University, Palestine, on ‘The Politics of Elections and the Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East: Perspectives from Within and Below'. The workshops are part of a collaborative project with the history division at the University of Northampton, UK, and the graduate programme on democracy at Birzeit University, Palestine.

Also in 2006 one of the research students in the School working on the Holy Land received a major grant from the Palestinian American Research Centre (PARC) based in Bethesda, MD, US.

The Centre benefits from the expertise of leading historians in the School, including Dr Glenn Richardson, Dr Mark Donnelly, Professor Nur Masalha, Dr Claire Norton and Dr Daniel Grey as well those scholars involved in religious studies such as Professor Mary Grey and Dr Lynne Scholefield.

Dr Richardson (a Reader in Early Modern History) is Programme Director of History and Acting Programme Director of the MA in History, Culture and Beliefs. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has published extensively on Tudor England's political and cultural relations with continental Europe and on European renaissance monarchy;

Dr Donnelly's publications focus on Britain since the Second World War, especially the 1960s and Holocaust memorialisation in Britain;

Dr Claire Norton mainly works on early modern Ottoman history, particularly focusing on instances of cultural transfer and interaction among communities living in border areas and other liminal spaces; she is interested in the processes and complexities of identity formation, motivations for conversion. In April 2006 Dr Norton organized an international conference on “The Renaissance and the Ottoman World” in conjunction with the Warburg Institute, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the School;

Professor Nur Masalha has been serving for many years on review panels of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK; he has been Director of the Holy Land Research Project since 2001 and edits Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal; his work focuses on religion in the Middle East, Islamic revivalism, new Palestinian and Israeli historiography and religious fundamentalism in comparative perspective;

Dr Scholefield's work is on conversion to Judaism, Christianity and Islam and women involved in Jewish-Christian dialogues;

Professor Mary Grey is a theologian who has published extensively on the history of liberation and feminist theologies.

Until 2008 the Centre housed the Joan Henderson Memorial Lecture in religious history. Joan Henderson was a historian and a fellow of St Mary’s from 1999 until her death in 2002. Set up by Dr Maria Dowling, the fifth and final Henderson lecture was delivered by Dr Glenn Richardson in June 2008, entitled: “England, France and the European Reformation”. It looked at the close relationship between Henry VIII and his French counterpart Francois I at the time of the English King’s break with Rome.

The Centre currrently houses a number of history-based projects, such as the Holy Land Research Project and the Michael Prior Memorial Lecture. Professor Michael Prior (1942-2004) was a liberation theologian and Professor of Theology and the Bible at St Mary’s. The memorial lecture is co-organized jointly with the Living Stones of the Holy Land Trust, an ecumenical trust seeking to promote contacts between Christian communities in Britain and those in the Holy land and Middle East.

The HLRP is also houses Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal, a fully refereed international journal published by Edinburgh University Press. A Spanish-language edition, Estudios de Tierra Santa: Una Revista Multidisciplinaria, is also published by the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Editorial Canaán, Argentina.

For further information, contact Professor Nur Masalha, Director of the Centre, School of Theology, Philosophy and History.
Email: masalhan@smuc.ac.uk; Tel: 020 8240 4193.