Timothy Fitzgerald is Visiting Research Professor at the University of Queensland in the Institute of the Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He is a central member of the Centre fir Critical Research on Religion (https://criticaltheoryofreligion.org/). He is the author of The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford University Press), Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: a critical history of religion and related categories (Oxford University Press, 2007), the edited volume Religion and the Secular: historical and colonial formations (Equinox, 2007), and Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth (Bloomsbury, 2011).
In this week's episode, Timothy Fitzgerald speaks with David G. Robertson about why the history of the category “religion” should make us reconsider many other modern categories like politics, liberal, secular. Can these interrelated terms ever escape their origins in centuries of colonial epistemé?
Tim Fitzgerald - a founding figure in the critical study of religion - discusses his career up to his seminal volume, The Ideology of Religious Studies, published twenty years ago this year.
The inspiration for this episode came from one of Russell McCutcheon's works which we had encountered through the undergraduate Religious Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh, entitled 'Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion'. The result is this compilation of differing opinions and interpretations ...
In this interview, Timothy Fitzgerald presents his critical deconstruction of religion as a powerful discourse and its parasitic relation to ‘secular’ categories such as politics and economics. Religion is not a stand-alone category, he argues; ‘religions’ are modern inventions which are made to appear ubiquitous and, by being removed to a marginal, ...
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