Content by Dr. Christopher Cotter

Chris Cotter is a Religious Studies scholar by training, specializing in all things ‘non-religous’. Beginning Sept 2017 he is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, working on a comparative study of communities in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

He completed his doctorate in Religious Studies at Lancaster University in 2016. His thesis–Religion-Related Discourse: A Critical Approach to Non-Religion in Edinburgh’s Southside–focused upon the discourses on ‘religion’ in the Southside of Edinburgh, the concepts of ‘non-religion’ and ‘the secular’, and the ensuing critical and theoretical implications for Religious Studies. His previous degrees at the University of Edinburgh focused upon ‘New Atheism’ and alternative typologies of ‘non-religion’, and his wider interests include New Religious Movements, qualitative methods, discourse analysis, spatial approaches, critical theory, and Religious Studies as a discipline.

He is co-editor of Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular  (Ashgate, 2013), After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (Routledge, 2016), and New Atheism: Critical Perspectives and Contemporary Debates (Springer, 2017), and has also published journal articles, book chapters and reviews in related areas. He is also co-editor of the open-access journal Secularism & Nonreligion.

He is co-founder, co-editor-in-chief, and co-host of the The Religious Studies Project podcast, and CEO of The Religious Studies Project Association (SCIO). I am also Co-Director at the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network, Honorary Treasurer of the British Association for the Study of Religions, and a member of the Culture on the Edge research collaborative.