Professor Douglas Davies
| Post Nominals | FAcSS, FLSW, FBA |
|---|---|
| Biography | Douglas J. Davies is an anthropologist and theologian specialising in the history, theology, and social-scientific study of death. Educated in Social Anthropology (1966-69) and Theology (1971-74) at Durham University, with the intervening years spent at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology under the distinguished sociologist Bryan Wilson of All Souls (1969-71), Davies then moved to Nottingham University in 1974 as inaugural Lecturer in the Philosophy and Phenomenology of Religion where he also completed his first doctorate (1979). Returning to Durham in 1997 as Professor in the Study of Religion, Davies continues to teach and supervise undergraduate and postgraduate students on a variety of topics. He also serves as Director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies. Davies' broader academic interests embrace the anthropology, sociology, and phenomenology of religion, Mormonism, Sikhism, Anglicanism, and the ongoing interface between Anthropology and Theology (2002). His noteworthy titles among many include Meaning and Salvation in Religious Studies (1984); The Mormon Culture of Salvation (2000); The Encyclopedia of Cremation (2005); The Theology of Death (2008); Emotion, Identity, and Religion (2011); and Mors Britannica: Lifestyle and Death-Style in Britain Today (2015). Death, Ritual, and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites, now in its third edition (1997, 2002, 2017), has been translated into five languages. Elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2009, the Learned Society of Wales in 2012, and the British Academy in 2017, Davies' contribution to scholarship has also been recognised internationally in numerous funded collaborations and appointments, and by an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University (1998). This was shortly followed, in 2004, by a higher doctorate for research (D.Litt.) from the University of Oxford. In 2024, Davies published a major six-volume work on The Cultural History of Death spanning 2,500 years from Classical Antiquity to the Modern Age. |
| Teaching and Learning | THEO1131: Worldview-Religious Studies (Level 1) THEO2231: Death, Ritual, and Belief (Level 2) THEO2531: Sects, Prophets, and Gurus (Level 2) THEO2601: Emotion, Identity, and Religion (Levels 2 and 3) THEO56730: Ritual, Symbolism, and Belief in the Anthropology of Religion (Level 4) |
| PhD Supervision Availability | Yes |
Department of Theology and Religion | Meet our staff | Douglas Davies
Prof Douglas Davies explores the contexts in which people practice their ideas and feel their emotions. Religion just happens to be one framework that really shows how theories about life link with ways of living life - in other words about 'doctrine' and 'ethics'. These are rather formal words concerned with what we think and how we act. We can therefore put together emotion, identity, and religion and see it as a very focused way of study and yet, at the same time, while we're studying other people, we are really studying ourselves: what's my identity like? What's my emotion like? What religious or worldview frameworks do I have? How, then, might we come to understand that every worldview, religious or otherwise, has its own preferred emotional patterns that frame identity and signpost destiny?