Research group: Race, Religion, Ethnicity and Community

About our research

Our work takes a cross- and inter-disciplinary approach to crucial questions about race, religion, and ethnicity.

We look at the way in which religious, racial and ethnic identities have developed over time, and how different communities have encountered and understood one another, whether in cooperation or in conflict.

Exploring the history of these identities and encounters helps us to understand contemporary issues such as structural inequality, religious violence and community formation.

Our areas of work include:

studies of Burmese temples and manuscripts
the history of travel to the Holy Land from the Middle Ages to the present
communities of print in early-modern England
early-modern debates about the apocalypse and Jewish restoration
Taiping theology in nineteenth-century China
slave-holding women in the United States civil war
Jewish communities in nineteenth-century London
racial ideas in the Renaissance
political groups in industrial Britain
cultural memories of the troubles in Northern Ireland

We help heritage organisations and museums in the United Kingdom and internationally develop their work.

And we supervise postgraduate students conducting historical research.

Our expertise

We are committed to developing intellectual, professional and public debates about:

the questions generated by encounters between different communities
movement, and the spread of ideas through travel
ways in which ideas can lead to community formation

Selected projects

Single, White Slaveholding Women

Finding fresh insights into the lives of privileged white women in the nineteenth century American south by examining the impact of being single.
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Mapping the Jewish history of London and Manchester

Two new websites are helping to preserve and open up the history of Jewish communities in the two cities.
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