Wilson appointed new Director of the Research Centre ‘Religion, Conflict and the Public Domain’

In our increasingly globalized world, the importance of academic knowledge concerning the interrelations between religion, culture and society is growing. Perhaps now more than ever, there is a need for specialists who can explain the meaning and background of conflicts and differences of opinion where religion plays a role – experts with comprehensive knowledge of the theology, ethics, philosophy and history of various religious traditions, who are able to understand, interpret and explain the cultural and social dynamics of religion and religious phenomena, using facts and sound arguments. Such specialists work at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies in Groningen.

The Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies recently established a Research Centre for ‘Religion, Conflict and the Public Domain’. The Centre will engage in research on the contentious, frequently misunderstood and often ignored role of religion in the public sphere in modern Western society.

ERIN K. WILSON is the newly-appointed director of the Centre for Religion, Conflict and the Public Domain at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen. She has previously worked in the Globalism Research Centre at RMIT University and received her PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia in 2008. Dr Wilson’s research focuses on the intersection of religion with various dimensions of political theory and practice, in particular global justice, migration, humanitarianism and globalization. Her first book, After Secularism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), reveals the embedded implicit ways in which religion continues to influence Western politics and society in the 21^st century.