Prof Graham Harvey

Professional biography

Although I have retired from the OU RS team I continue to supervise 3 PhD students. I joined the RS team at the OU in 2003 and was Head of Department from 2013-17. Among other roles, I have reviously supervised 18 PhD students to the succesful completion of their PhDs. 

I did my PhD at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne under the supervision of Prof John F.A. Sawyer. This was about the rhetorics of group identity in ancient Jewish literatures (including the Qumran scrolls, apocryphal and apocalyptic texts, early Christian and formative Rabbinic writings). Having been brought up relatively near Stonehenge and participating in Stonehenge Peoples Free Festival in the 1970s, I was invited to contribute a presentation about contemporary Druids at a conference ... and so became a fieldwork researcher among Pagans. This has resulted in many publications, especially Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism (now in its second edition with Hurst and Co., and with New York University Press) and Researching Paganisms (2004).  

An interest in religion, location and ecology fused with interests in the cultures of Indigenous peoples to generate yet another shift in my research career. I have been privileged to spend time with various generous and interesting hosts, including in Aotearoa, Australia, Hawaii, Newfoundland, Nigeria, the Ojibwe traditional territories and Sápmi. Most of my research about contemporary Indigenous religious traditions has been about “animism”: the varied ways in which people engage with the larger than human world. I have followed up my monograph, Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005; 2nd edition in May 2017), with the edited Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013). Indigenous definitions of religion (e.g. the late Māori scholar, Te Pakaka Tawhai’s statement that the “purpose of religious activity … is doing violence with impunity”) play a vital role in my argument for a new definition of and approach to religion in Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013).  

I have also been a member of the research team for a project called "Re-assembling democracy" (funded by the Norwegian Research Council (see http://www.tf.uio.no/english/research/projects/redo/) for which I have been privileged to spend time at the Riddu Riđđu festival in Sápmi (in the arctic). I have written about the festival and the ORIGINS Festival of First Nations, hosted in London biennially, and the ways in which they generate new approaches to democracy, citizenship, ecology and more.

Much of my recent research has contributed to debates about "the new animism" (partially overlapping with "new materialism" and other areas). 

​I have been a member of the ESRC, AHRC and Australian Research Council peer review colleges. I was President of the British Association for the Study of Religions (2011-15), following service as Secretary (2003-2009).

I'm also a member of the following:

• British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR)
• European Association for the Study of Religion (EASR)
• Society for the Study of Native American Religious Traditions (SSNART)
• Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
• Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). 

I have been external examiner at the Universities of Gloucester, Durham, Greenwich, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Winchester, Middlesex, Aberdeen and Lancaster.

Research interests

My current research has two strands. First there is my ongoing interest in Indigenous kinship, rituals and performance cultures. I have co-edited with Afe Adogame (Princeton, USA) The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Indigenous Religions (to be published in 2025). I am also founding co-editor of the book series Vitality of Indigenous Religions monograph series (also published by Routledge). https://www.routledge.com/Vitality-of-Indigenous-Religions/book-series/AINDIREL

Secondly, I am co-editing with Aldea Mulhern (Brandon University, Canada) edit the Religion and Taste volume for the Equinox book series, Religion and the Senses:  https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/religion-and-the-senses

PUBLICATIONS

​See Open Research Online for further details of my research publications.