2019 ISSRNC Conference – Keynote Speaker Marion Bowman
Marion Bowman – Religious Studies, Open University, UK
The ISSRNC is delighted to announce that Marion Bowman will deliver a keynote speech at our 2019 conference, Religion, Water, Climate: Changing Cultures and Landscapes in Cork, Ireland.
Bowman has worked in the Religious Studies department at The Open University since 2000. She is now a Guest Researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway, and Vice-President of the European Association for the Study of Religions.
Working at the interstices of religious studies and folklore/ ethnology, Marion’s research interests are rooted in contemporary vernacular religion – the experiences, worldviews, beliefs, practices and material culture of individuals and groups in in specific locations and contexts – and she has conducted a long term study of the town of Glastonbury.
A former president of both the British Association for the Study of Religions and of The Folklore Society, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Oslo 2016-2018, having also previously been a visiting lecturer/professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia; University of Bayreuth, Germany; University of Pecs, Hungary; Abo Akademi, Finland and University of Bergen, Norway.
Marion was Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals, Past and Present, 2014-2018 (http://www.pilgrimageandcathedrals.ac.uk/about ), and has recently co-edited with Simon Coleman a special themed issue of the journal Religion (Vol 49, Issue 1, 2019) ‘Religion in cathedrals: pilgrimage, heritage, adjacency, and the politics of replication in Northern Europe’.
Her publications include:
Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief. (New York & London: Routledge 2012), co-edited with Ulo Valk.
‘From production to performance: Candles, creativity and connectivity’ in Tim Hutchings and Joanne McKenzie, eds. Materiality and the Study of Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred (London and New York: Routledge, 2017) pp. 35-52
‘The Contented Collector: Materiality, Relationality and the Power of Things’ Material Religion volume 12, issue 3, 2016, pp. 393–397
‘”He’s My Best Friend”: Relationality, Materiality, and the Manipulation of Motherhood in Devotion to St Gerard Majella in Newfoundland’ in Terry Woo & Becky Lee, eds. Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 3-34.
‘“Helping Glastonbury to Come into Its Own”: Practical Spirituality, Materiality, and Community Cohesion in Glastonbury’ in Practical Spiritualities in a Media Age, edited by Curtis C Coats and Monica M Emerich (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 51-65.
We are honored to have Professor Bowman present her research at Religion, Water, Climate: Changing Cultures and Landscapes and hope that you will join us in the audience at University College Cork!
The call for papers is still open for our 2019 conference in Cork. You can find more details online here.
