Dr Anna Strhan
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Profile

Biography

• BA (Cambridge)
• MA (Sussex)
• PhD (Institute of Education, University of London)
• PhD (Kent)

My research interests lie in the relations between religion, secularism, ethics, and moral life. My work draws together approaches from sociology, anthropology, and philosophy to explore how religion, ethics, and values interact with the social world.

I joined the Department of Sociology in 2018, having previously worked at the University of Kent. My initial doctoral work was primarily philosophical, examining the implications of the work of Emmanuel Levinas for how we think about the relations between subjectivity, ethics, and education. This was the subject of my first monograph, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility. After completing my PhD, I decided to move into the sociology of religion and completed a second PhD which developed my interests in morality and ethical life through an ethnographic study of a large conservative evangelical congregation in London. My second book, Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals, was based on this research. I took up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Kent in 2012, followed by a lectureship in 2015.

My Leverhulme fellowship focused on religion and childhood, and resulted in my third monograph, The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism, which explores the lived realities of how evangelical Christians engage with children across the spaces of church, school, home, and other informal education spaces, how children experience these forms of engagement, and the meanings and significance of childhood. I also co-edited the Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood and Religion and the Global City, and have recently co-edited Where is the Good in the World? Ethical life between Social Theory and Philosophy, which explores what it means to study values and the good as fundamental aspects of social life.

My recent research has focused on different aspects of religion, education, childhood, citizenship, and place, in relation to wider questions of religious and cultural change.

My current book project (with Rachael Shillitoe) is entitled Growing Up Godless: Nonreligious Childhoods in Contemporary England. The rise of the avowedly non-religious - especially amongst younger age cohorts - across many formerly Christian liberal democracies has prompted growing research interest in ‘non-religion’, atheism, and other forms of so-called ‘unbelief’. Yet although we know that growing numbers of children are growing up non-religious, we know little about how this change is taking place in everyday life, or its significance for children and their families. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with children, parents, and schoolteachers, our book addresses this gap through examining how, when, where, and with whom children learn to be non-religious, and considers what this means both for children and their parents.

I am also currently leading a three-year Leverhulme Trust funded project, Becoming Citizens of ‘Post-secular’ Britain: Religion in Primary School Life, together with Peter Hemming (Surrey), Sarah Neal (Sheffield), and Joanna Malone (York). This study aims to investigate the role of religion in the work that schools do to foster notions of citizenship and national identity, how children and their parents experience these processes, and what this means for children’s sense of belonging in wider society. Building on my research on non-religious childhoods, I am also leading a research project entitled Becoming Non-believers: Explaining Atheism in Childhood.

Research

Overview

My research interests lie within the following areas:

• Morality, ethics and values
• Urban religion
• Contemporary Christianity/ies
• Nonreligion and Secularity
• Religion and Childhood
• Education and Religion
• Evangelicalism
• Religion and Parenting

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students in these or related areas.

Publications

Selected publications

Books:

• Strhan, A. and Shillitoe, R. (in press) Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Strhan, A. (2019) The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Strhan, A. (2015) Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Strhan, A. (2012) Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Edited volumes:

• Henig, D., Strhan, A. and Robbins, J. (2022) Where is the Good in the World? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy New York: Berghahn.
• Garbin, D. and Strhan, A. (2017) Religion and the Global City London: Bloomsbury.
• Strhan, A., Parker, S. G., and Ridgely, S. (2017) The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood London: Bloomsbury.
• Lynch, G., Mitchell, J., and Strhan, A. (2011) Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader New York: Routledge.

Journal articles:

• Strhan, A., Lee, L., and Shillitoe, R. (2024) Becoming Humanist: Worldview Formation and the Emergence of Atheist Britain Sociology of Religion https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srad050
• Di Placido, M., Strhan, A., and Palmisano, S. (2022) Modern Postural Yoga and the Health-Spirituality-Neoliberalism Nexus. Fieldwork in Religion. https://doi.org/10.1558/firn.24253
• Strhan, A. and Shillitoe, R. (2022) The Experiences of Non-religious Children in Religious Education Journal of Religious Education DOI 10.1007/s40839-022-00180-y.
• Shillitoe, R. and Strhan, A. (2020) ‘Just leave it blank’: Non-Religious Children and their Negotiation of Prayer in School Religion 50(4): 615-635.
• Strhan, A. and Shillitoe, R. (2019) The Stickiness of Non-Religion? Intergenerational Transmission and the Formation of Non-Religious Identities in Childhood Sociology 53(6): 1094-1110.
• Strhan, A. (2017) ‘I want there to be no glass ceiling:’ Evangelicals’ Engagements with Class, Education, and Urban Childhoods Sociological Research Online, 22(1), DOI: 10.5153/sro.4259
• Strhan, A. (2016) Levinas, Durkheim, and the Everyday Ethics of Education Educational Philosophy and Theory 48(4): 331-345.
• Strhan, A. (2013) Christianity and the City: Simmel, Space and Urban Subjectivities. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4: 125-149.
• Strhan, A. (2013) The Metropolis and Evangelical Life: Coherence and Fragmentation in the lost city of London Religion 43(3): 331-352.
• Strhan, A. (2013) Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student Journal of Contemporary Religion 28(2): 225-239.
• Strhan, A. (2012) Latour, Prepositions and the Instauration of Secularism Political Theology 13(2): 200-216.
• Strhan, A. (2010) A Religious Education Otherwise? An examination and proposed interruption of current British practice Journal of Philosophy of Education 44(1): 23-44.
• Strhan, A. (2010) The Obliteration of Truth by Management: Badiou, St Paul and the question of economic managerialism in education Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(2): 230-250.

Book chapters:

• Henig, D. and Strhan, A. (2022) Introduction: The Good between Social Theory and Philosophy. In D. Henig, A. Strhan and J. Robbins (eds) Where is the Good in the World? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy. New York, Berghahn, 1-32.
• Strhan, A. (2022) ‘God isn’t a Communist’: Conservative Evangelicals, Money and Morality in London. In D. Henig, A. Strhan and J. Robbins (eds) Where is the Good in the World? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy. New York, Berghahn, pp. 161-179.
• Garbin, D. and Strhan, A. (2017) Introduction: Locating Religion and the Global City. In D. Garbin and A. Strhan (eds) Religion and the Global City. London, Bloomsbury, pp. 1-24.
• Strhan, A. (2017) Conservative Evangelical Listening Practices and the Embodiment of Faith. In L. van Liere, A.M. Korte and B. Becking (eds) Contesting Religious Identities. Leiden, Brill, pp. 240-260.
• Strhan, A. (2017) Matters of Life and Death. In A. Carroll and R. Norman (eds) Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide. London, Routledge, pp. 141-153.
• Strhan, A. (2016) English Evangelicals and the Claims of Equality. In D. Llewellyn and S. Sharma (eds) Religion, Equalities and Inequalities. Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 163-176.
• Strhan, A. (2016) Evangelical Anglicans and the Formation of Children in Modern Britain. In A. Day (ed.) Contemporary Issues in the Worldwide Anglican Communion. Farnham, Ashgate, pp. 39-53.
• Strhan, A. (2015) Negotiating the Public and Private in Everyday Evangelicalism. In T. Hjelm (ed.) Is God Back? Reconsidering the New Visibility of Religion. London, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 77-89.
• Strhan, A. (2014) Listening Subjects, Rationality and Modernity. In A. McKinnon and M. Trzebiatowska (eds) Sociological Theory and the Question of Religion. Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 199-220.
• Strhan, A. (2014) English Evangelicals, Equality and the City. In H. Shipley (ed.) Globalized Religion and Sexual Identity. Leiden, Brill, pp. 236-255.