I am a product of a liberal arts education – a combined Arts/Law degree from the University of Melbourne in which I pursued a major in Medieval and Renaissance History with minors in English Literature, European politics and the study of Italian. I carried these experiences of interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, and flexible learning into careers in law and the Australian civil service, before moving into academia (through a Masters of Divinity in Systematic Theology) and then a DPhil in Modern British History at Wadham College, Oxford.

For more information, please see my full research profile.

Research interests and PhD supervision

I am one of the leading experts in the modern religious history of Britain, with a particular focus on lived religious experience, gendered and material piety, and the reception of the Second Vatican Council (1962-5).

My broader research interests and PhD supervision activities reflect my interdisciplinary background, cross-periodisation focus, and commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion. They centre on the shifts in social and cultural identities and subjectivities across the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries through the lens of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and belief. I am particularly interested in the manifestations of these self-definitions and personal politics through oral history, ritual and performance, pilgrimage, material and visual cultures, and spatial and narrative practices.

Key areas of expertise include:

• Religious identities, (post) secularisation, religious pluralism, feminist theology, and the missionary movement;
• Gender, Sexuality, and global feminisms;
• Ethnicity, Diasporic Identities and Racism;
• Oral History and Material Cultures;
• History of Childhood (including institutional care and abuse);
• History of Psychiatry, Disability, and therapeutic cultures.

 

Teaching

I teach modules across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality; race and ethnicity (especially focused on London); religion, belief and ritual; and historical methodology and archival praxis - including collaborative with the Mass Observation, Black Cultural archives and South London Citizens.

Expertise and public engagement

I have frequently contributed to newspapers (Guardian, Independent, Tablet, Catholic Herald) and radio programmes (BBC4 Woman’s Hour; Archive on 4), as well as working as a historical consultant (Young Vic theatre, various BBC Productions) on topics relating to women’s emotional lives, modern Catholicism, pilgrimage, queer London, and historical approaches to mission, migration and evangelisation.

Current public engagement work is centred on recovering the forgotten psychiatric history of Epsom (where I also live) - thehorton9000- which includes work on a disability and arts project funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund with Freewheelers Theatre and Media Company, the photographer Emma Brown, and On-the-Record community historians.

I am also the Co-I on an AHRC Catalyst project with Dr Victoria Hoyle (York) and Patricia Debney and Survivors Voices entitled "Remembering Together: Co-creating a living toolkit for child sexual abuse activism, 1960-2024".

Selected publications

Alana Harris (ed.), The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume V: Recapturing the Apostolate of the Laity, 1914-2021 (Oxford University Press, 2023);

Alana Harris (ed.), The Schism of 68: Catholicism, Contraception and Humanae Vitae in Europe 1945-1975 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018);

Alana Harris, Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism, 1945-82 (Manchester University Press, 2013);

Alana Harris and Laura Mitchison 'Us and Them: Disability Ethics, Oral History and Inclusive Praxis in the Reuse of Asylum Photography’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2025), doi.org/10.1017/S0080440125100418

Alana Harris and Massimo Fagglioli, ‘Pursuing the Long Shadow over the “Domestic Church”: Towards a Global History of Abuse in Catholic Settings’, 110(2) (2024) Catholic Historical Review, 55-84.