Peter Harrison (historian)

Peter Harrison

Peter Harrison FAHA (born 1955) is an Australian Laureate Fellow and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland.

Career

Peter Harrison holds a DLitt from the University of Oxford, a PhD from the University of Queensland, and master's degrees from Yale and Oxford. He began his academic career at Bond University on Australia’s Gold Coast, where for a number of years he was professor of history and philosophy. From 2007 to 2011 he was Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford.[1][2] During his time at Oxford, he was director of the Ian Ramsey Centre and a fellow of Harris Manchester College. He became the inaugural director of the University of Queensland's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in July 2015. A fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he was a recipient of a Centenary Medal in 2003. He was the 2011 Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh[3] and is a senior research fellow in the Ian Ramsey Centre at Oxford. In 2014 he was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship to conduct a five-year research project exploring science and secularization.[4] In 2015, The Territories of Science and Religion was named winner of the Aldersgate Prize.[5]

Writings

Harrison is best known for a number of influential writings on religion and the origins of modern science. He has argued that changing approaches to the interpretation of the Bible had a significant impact on the development of modern science. He has also suggested that the biblical story of the Fall played a key role in the development of experimental science. His earlier work traces changing conceptions of religion in the West. Harrison contends that the idea of religions as sets of beliefs and practices emerged for the first time in the seventeenth century. This earlier work on religion was revisited in his 2011 Gifford Lectures, where he argued that current conceptions of both 'science' and 'religion' are relatively recent Western inventions, and that contemporary relations between science and religion are to some extent already built into the categories themselves. Rethinking the relations between science and religion, on this account, is not a matter of considering relations between scientific and religious doctrines, but of rethinking the ways in which science and religion themselves are currently conceptualised.

Selected publications

  • "Narratives of Secularization". Routledge 2018. ISBN 978-1138563568.
  • "The Territories of Science and Religion". University of Chicago Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0226184487. The Gifford Lectures. Read an excerpt.
  • Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science. Co-edited with Ronald Numbers and Michael Shank University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-31783-0.
  • The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-71251-4.
  • The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 0-521-87559-5.
  • The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-00096-3.
  • Religion' and the religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-521-89293-7.

Notes

  1. ↑ Who's Who entry
  2. ↑ "Career History". uq.academia.au. Retrieved 26 September 2018.
  3. ↑ 2010-2011 Gifford Lecture Archives from The University of Edinburgh
  4. ↑ http://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2014/08/historian-and-neuroscientist-are-uq’s-new-australian-laureate-fellows
  5. ↑ https://www.indwes.edu/news/2016/01/2015-aldersgate-prize-awarded-to-australian-laureate-fellow#.VtWFwmR95cx
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