Peter Harrison

Biography

Peter Harrison was educated at the University of Queensland and Yale University. In 2011 he moved back to Queensland from the University of Oxford where for a number of years he was the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion. At Oxford he was a member of the Faculties of Theology and History, a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, and Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre where he continues to hold a Senior Research Fellowship. He has published extensively in the area of cultural and intellectual history with a focus on the philosophical, scientific and religious thought of the early modern period. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford, Yale, and Princeton, is a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2011 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.

His five books include, most recently, Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science (Chicago, 2011)”an edited collection which surveys conceptions of science from antiquity to the present”and The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge, 2010). He has published over 60 articles or book chapters. He is currently editing his Gifford Lectures under the working title of ‘Science, Religion and Modernity’ and is also working on a project concerned with conceptions of progress in history and the historical sciences.