I am a Religious Studies scholar by training and joined The Open University in January 2022 as Staff Tutor and Lecturer in Sociology and Religious Studies.
I am author of The Critical Study of Non-religion: Discourse, Identification and Locality (Bloomsbury, 2020) and co-editor of Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular (Ashgate, 2013), After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (Routledge, 2016), and New Atheism: Critical Perspectives and Contemporary Debates (Springer, 2017). I am also co-editor of the open-access journal Secularism & Nonreligion.
I completed my doctorate in Religious Studies at Lancaster University in 2016. My thesis focused upon the discourses on ‘religion’ in the Southside of Edinburgh, the concepts of ‘non-religion’ and ‘the secular’, and the ensuing critical and theoretical implications for Religious Studies. My previous degrees at the University of Edinburgh focused upon ‘New Atheism’ and alternative typologies of ‘non-religion’. My wider interests include New Religious Movements, qualitative methods, discourse analysis, spatial approaches, critical theory, and Religious Studies as a discipline. After these periods of study, I was Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (2017-2020), Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Chester (2020-2021), IASH-CTPI Duncan Forrester Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh (2020-2021), and Teaching Fellow in Anthropology and Sociology of Religions at the University of Edinburgh (2021).
I am also co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the The Religious Studies Project podcast, Honorary Treasurer of the British Association for the Study of Religions and an advisory board member the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network. See my personal blog for a full CV.
Non-religion as Religion-Related Discourse: An Empirical Invitation (2022-06-15)
Cotter, C. R.
In: Zwilling, A. L. and Årsheim, H. eds. Nonreligion in Late Modern Societies. Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies (pp. 229-250)
ISBN : 978-3-030-92394-5 | Publisher : Springer | Published : Cham
Religion in Fortress Europe: Perspectives on Belief, Citizenship and Identity in a Time of Polarized Politics (2023-03)
Hashemi, Morteza and Cotter, Christopher R. eds.
ISBN : 9781350341104 | Publisher : Bloomsbury