Dr. Matthew Engelke, anthropologist and senior lecturer at the London School of Economics (LSE), will present “God’s Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England” on Friday, April 15, at 12:00 p.m., in Scripps College’s Balch Conference Room. This event is free and open to the public.
Engelke will speak about research he conducted on an evangelical Christian charity in England, and how the charity is attempting to shape the ways in which people understand and engage with the Bible. He will address secularism, public religion, and religious publicity, and how anthropology can contribute to our understanding of those dynamics in today’s world.
Specializing in the anthropology of religion, Engelke conducted his first extensive fieldwork on churches in Zimbabwe in the 1990s. While there, he became interested in the discourse of human rights at the local level. Since 2002, he has served on the advisory board of the L SE’s Center for the Study of Human Rights. He has received funding for ethnographic research from the British Humanist Association, and his work has appeared in publications such as Social Anthropology, Ethnos, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Engelke was awarded the Clifford Geertz in the Anthropology of Religion in 2008 and the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing in 2009.
Currently, Engelke is the editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Religion in Africa and the advisory boards of the Journal of Southern African Studies and Religion and Society. In addition, he regularly serves as an expert witness in asylum appeal cases for Zimbabweans in the United Kingdom.
For more information, please contact the Scripps College department of anthropology at (909) 607-3250.