Dr Alan Strathern
Associate Professor in History
Brasenose College
01865 (2)77877
I work on the global history of religious encounter and conversion, particularly in those regions that came into contact with European travellers in the early modern period (1500-1800). However, I have recently completed a more general theoretical book on fundamental religious change and its relationship with politics across the world: Unearthly Powers: Transformations of Religion and Politics in World History (Cambridge 2019), while a companion volume will look at ruler conversions in Kongo, Hawaii, Japan and Thailand. I first specialised in Sri Lankan history, as in my first monograph, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth Century Sri Lanka (2007), and articles on such themes as origin myths, source criticism, sacred kingship, and ethnic identity.
I teach both European and Global History as a Fellow at Brasenose College, and a Lecturer at St. John's College. I'm happy to consider DPhil supervision across a wide range of areas in the early modern world.
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Featured Publication
Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (Cambridge 2019).
Why was religion so important for rulers in the pre-modern world? And how did the world come to be dominated by just a handful of religious traditions, especially Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism? Drawing on sociology and anthropology, as well as a huge range of historical literature from all regions and periods of world history, Alan Strathern sets out a new way of thinking about transformations in the fundamental nature of religion and its interaction with political authority. His analysis distinguishes between two quite different forms of religiosity - immanentism, which focused on worldly assistance, and transcendentalism, which centred on salvation from the human condition - and shows how their interaction shaped the course of history. Taking examples drawn from Ancient Rome to the Incas or nineteenth-century Tahiti, a host of phenomena, including sacred kingship, millenarianism, state-church struggles, reformations, iconoclasm, and, above all, conversion are revealed in a new light.
Find out more: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/unearthly-powers/2A53B703811A4344B65CF37CC9C6E143
Global Early Modernity and the Problem of What Came Before, Past & Present, Volume 238, Issue suppl_13, 1 November 2018, Pages 317–344
Find out more: https://academic.oup.com/past/article/238/suppl_13/317/5230767?guestAccessKey=f3ca0a74-7dd6-4aaf-9f39-a9dbcd5584a0
‘Religion and Empire’, Encylcopedia of Empire, ed. John MacKenzie (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
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