Peter Harrison (historian)

Peter Harrison

Peter Harrison FAHA (b. 1955) is Research Professor and Director of the Centre of the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland.

Career

Peter Harrison holds a PhD from the University of Queensland and Master's degrees from Yale and Oxford. He began his academic career at Bond University on Australia’s Gold Coast, where for a number of years he was Professor of History and Philosophy. In 2006 he was elected Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. During his time at Oxford he was Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. In 2011 he assumed directorship of the Centre of the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he was a recipient of a Centenary Medal in 2003. He was the 2011 Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and is a Senior Research Fellow in the Ian Ramsey Centre at Oxford.

Writings

Harrison is best known for a number of influential writings on religion and the origins of modern science. He has argued that changing approaches to the interpretation of the bible had a significant impact on the development of modern science. He has also suggested that the biblical story of the Fall played a key role in the development of experimental science. His earlier work traces changing conceptions of religion in the West. Harrison contends that the idea of religions as sets of beliefs and practices emerged for the first time in the seventeenth century.

Major Publications

• Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science. Co-edited with Ronald Numbers and Michael Shank University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN ISBN 978-0226317830.
• The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-71251-4.
• The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 0-521-87559-5.
• The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-00096-3.
• 'Religion' and the religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-521-89293-7.

External links

• Harrison's Worldcat identity
• Harrison's Oxford University bio
• List of publications
• Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, University of Oxford
• Harrison's Gifford Lectures on iTunesU
• Faraday Institute Lecture on Religion and the Early Royal Society
• Centre for the History of European Discourses