About
The Religious History Association was formed in 2010 from the amalgamation of the
Association for Religious History (founded 1959) and the Religious History Society (founded 1998).
Under its Constitution, the purposes of the association are to:
- Promote and advance thestudy of religious history
- Encourage research in Australian religious history
- Publish the Journal of Religious History
Our People
The first issue appeared in 1960. The Journal is now published on behalf of the Religious History Association by Wiley.

President
Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch is the Dean of Research Strategy at the University of Divinity. Her area of research is the cultural and social history of the Middle Ages and her research has contributed to the history of the crusades, memory and history, and medieval Cistercian monastic life. She is the author of Monastic Spaces and their Meanings (2001), Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination (2011), War and Memory at the time of the Fifth Crusade (2019) and Crusades and Violence (2023).

Secretary
Laura Rademaker is an ARC DECRA research fellow at the Australian National University. Her current project looks at the history of Indigenous self-determination in Australia. She is the author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (2018) on language and cross-cultural exchange at Christian missions to Aboriginal people, awarded the 2020 Hancock Prize. Her work explores the possibilities of ‘cross-culturalising’ history, interdisciplinary histories as well as oral history and memory. She is interested in religion, gender, secularisation, and ‘deep history’.

Treasurer
Michael Champion is Acting Director, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry Associate Dean (Research), Theology and Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic (2022) and Explaining the Cosmos: Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late-Antique Gaza (2014).

Committee Member
Kirk Essary is Associate Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on religious and intellectual history in late medieval and early modern Europe, with a special interest in Christian humanism, reception history (of classical and biblical texts), the Protestant Reformation, the relationship between philosophy and theology, and the history of emotions. He is the author of The Renaissance of Feeling: Erasmus and Emotion (2024).

Committee Member
Dr Aydogan Kars is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at Monash University. He specialises on Islamic intellectual history, with a focus on medieval theology, philosophy, and mysticism. He is the author of Unsaying God: Negative Theology in Medieval Islam (2019) and Umar al-Suhrawardī: Studies, Editions, Translations (2022).

Committee Member
Celeste McNamara a historian of early modern Italy, focusing on religious and popular culture. She is currently an assistant professor of history at Dublin City University. She is the author of The Bisho’s Burden: Reforming the Catholic Church in Early Modern Italy (2020). Celeste is co-editor of the Journal of Religious History.

Committee Member
Dr Miles Pattenden is Program Director of the Europaeum, Oxford and a researcher at Deakin University. He is a historian of the Catholic Church and the political history of Italy and Spain from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. He is the author of Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700 (2017) and Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome (2013). Miles is co-editor of the Journal of Religious History.

Committee Member
Leigh T.I. Penman is a historian of ideas who received a PhD from the University of Melbourne in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute für Geschichte in Göttingen in 2009. He has held teaching and research positions at the University of Oxford, University of London (Goldsmiths), and the University of Queensland. He is the author of Hope and Heresy: The Problem of Chiliasm in Lutheran Confessional Culture (2019), and The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism (2020).

Committee Member
Paul Watt is an adjunct professor of musicology at The University of Adelaide. He is the author of Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (2017), The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England (2018) and Music, Morality and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2024). He is currently writing a book on a cultural history of Gregorian chant in Australia. Paul is editorial manager for the Journal of Religious History.
Ordinary Membership
Subscribe to the Journal of Religious History through the Wiley website.
Become an Ordinary Member. This entitles you to receive the Religious History Association newsletter, vote and participate in RHA meetings, and receive discounts to attend RHA workshops and conferences.

Grants & Awards
The Bruce Mansfield Prize is named for the founding Editor of the Journal of Religious History, Emeritus Professor Bruce Mansfield (1926–2017) and is awarded for the best article published each year in the journal.
Brendan Röder, ‘Skin Colour and Priesthood. Debating Bodily Difference in Early Modern
Popular Emotional Education’, JRH 48:2 (2024), 135-152.
Jens Carlesson Magalhães and Fredrik Jansson ‘The Baptism of an Indian Juggler: Event and Narrative in the Swedish Press, 1827-1852′, JRH 47:2 (2023), 318-339.
Tinne Claes and Yulyia Hilevych Aiding Marital Childlessness: Christian Religious Responses to Husband and Donor Insemination in Belgium and Britain, 1940-1980′, JRH 46:3 (2022) 503- 525.
Makoto Harris Takao ‘Tokugawa Confucian Sermons as Popular Emotional Education: The Moral and Pedagogical Philosophy of Hosoi Heishū’, JRH 45:1 (2021): 50-67.
Journal
The Journal of Religious History was established by a group of historians at the University of Sydney in 1959. The first issue appeared in 1960. The Journal is now published on behalf of the Religious History Association by Wiley.

Co-Editor
Dr Celeste McNamara is Assistant Professor of history in the School of History and Geography, Dublin City University, Ireland. She is a specialist in early modern Italian history, Catholic Reform, and religious culture. She is the author of The Bishop’s Burden: Reforming the Catholic Church in Early Modern Italy (The Catholic University of America Press, 2020). Currently she is working on a project entitled Sin in the Serenissima: Illicit Sexuality in Early Modern Venice, which examines the policing of sexual morality by both secular and ecclesiastical officials.

Co-Editor
Miles Pattenden is Program Director of the Europaeum, Oxford and a researcher at Deakin University. He is a historian of the Catholic Church and the political history of Italy and Spain from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. He is the author of Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700 (2017) and Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome (2013). Miles is co-editor of the Journal of Religious History.

Editorial Manager
Paul Watt is an adjunct professor of musicology at The University of Adelaide. He is the author of Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (2017), The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England (2018) and Music, Morality and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2024). He is currently writing a book on a cultural history of Gregorian chant in Australia. Paul is editorial manager for the Journal of Religious History.
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