A senior researcher in religious studies at the OU has won an award to take a leadership role in a programme that brings together research funded by all the UK research councils and also to research religion, martyrdom and sacrificial death in Britain and Ireland.
Professor John Wolffe, Professor of Religious History at The Open University, has been awarded a Leadership Fellowship as part of the Global Uncertainties programme which represents research council investment in security related research.
The Fellowship will include two elements: the first will focus on concepts of religion as a pivot for bringing together wider issues in the Ideologies and beliefs strand of Global Uncertainties itself, and in related Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council programmes. Central to this strand will be engagement with practitioners and policy makers outside academia with a view to presenting the research in a manner that is accessible and relevant to their concerns.
The second strand will examine the development of the concept of martyrdom and sacrificial death in Britain and Ireland since the outbreak of the First World War.
"Such an enquiry will help to balance the preoccupation of researchers since 9/11 in 2001 with Islamic views of martyrdom/suicide attacks by a focus on the Christian and culturally Christian context, which remains under-researched in this period," said Professor Wolffe.
There will be two main methods. First, there will be archival, library, and web-based research on historic sources, including books and pamphlets, newspapers and online databases, supplemented as necessary by site visits. Particular focal points will be the First World War, including the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and the 1920 interment of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey; the Second World War, including Nazi persecution of European Christians, and the early 1980s, including the IRA hunger strikes and the Falklands War.
There will also be a series of semi-structured interviews with political and religious activists, carried out in partnership with the Institute for Conflict Research in Belfast, in four contrasting locations in Britain and Ireland - Belfast, Bradford, Dublin and London. These interviews will explore contemporary perceptions of historic 'martyrdom' events in the run up to the centenaries of 1914 and 1916; recollections of the early 1980s; and responses to present-day suicide attacks, sectarian murders in Northern Ireland, and casualties in Afghanistan.
