Peter Harrison

Biography

Peter Harrison was educated at the University of Queensland and Yale University. He began his academic career at Bond University in 1989, and subsequently took up the Idreos Chair in Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. At Oxford he was a member of the Faculties of Theology and History, a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, and Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre. On returning to Australia in 2012 he became the inaugural director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.  He was an Australian Laureate Fellow, 2015-21.  Now emeritus at UQ he is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford's Ian Ramsey Centre. He has published extensively on the philosophical, scientific and religious thought of the early modern period, and is interested in secularization theory and historical and contemporary relations between science and religion. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Yale, Princeton, Otago, and the University of Chicago, is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, and a corresponding member of the International Academy for the History of Science. In 2003, he recieved a Centenary Medal for 'service to Australian Society and the Humanities in the Study of Philosophy and Religion’. In 2011 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. He was awarded a DLitt by the University of Oxford in 2013, and delivered the Bampton Lectures at Oxford in 2019. From 2015-20 has was an Australian Laureate Fellow. His twelve books include, most recently, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (Cambridge, 2024), After Science and Religion (Cambridge, 2022), co-edited with John Milbank, and The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago, 2015), winner of the Aldersgate Prize.

Academic biography

Research topics

• History of Ideas
• Science and Religion