The NSRN Online team are responsible for everything that appears on this website and the NSRN Blog. Each member of the team is at various stages of their research, and all have distinct roles within NSRN Online. For information on those involved in the day-to-day running and overall vision of the NSRN as a whole, please see the NSRN Advisory Board page.
Press queries should be directed to Lois or to any of the NSRN advisory board members. For email addresses, please follow the hyperlinks at each person’s name.
Lauren is responsible for the commissioning of blog posts relating to environment and law.
Lauren is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. Drawing on theories of environmental and ecological justice, her research explores how religious and nonreligious settler activists conceptualize their opposition to an oil pipeline project in British Columbia. Lauren is the Student Representative of the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, and the former Student Caucus Leader for the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project.
Chris is responsible for the commissioning of blog posts relating to death and dying.
Chris is a sociologist of religion and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project at the University of Ottawa. He received his BA from the University of Toronto and MA at Saint Mary’s University. He completed his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo, exploring how academic sub-fields develop and how marginal communities interact with research. His current projects examine death, dying, and nonreligion, through analyses of obituaries, Death Cafés, and green burials. In other research projects he explores broader themes including New Religious Movements, popular culture, and social media.
Sociology, University of Córdoba – CONICET, Argentina
Guadalupe is a sociologist and a PhD student in Social Studies of Latin America at the University of Córdoba. She was granted adoctoral scholarship by Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Spanish: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET).
Her doctoral research engages conservative activism’s discourse – religious and nonreligious – against the expansion of sexual and (non)reproductive rights in Argentina.
School of Religion, Queen’s University, Kingston (ON), Canada
Sharday is responsible for the commissioning of blog posts relating to North America.
Sharday (BA [Art History, Sociocultural Anthropology], University of Western Ontario; MA, PhD [Cultural Studies], Queen’s University) is Assistant Professor (Contemporary Religious Context) at the School of Religion at Queen’s University, Kingston, ON. She studies the discursive construction of spirituality and religion as well as concepts of nonreligion and secularity. Specific interests include the study of “new religious movements” [NRMs], ritual, and religion and/as media. Her major line of research continues to be about the relationship between boredom and spirituality – the modern concept of boredom as a spiritual crisis, and whether boredom motivates religious or spiritual seeking, switching, and leaving.
Katja is responsible for the commissioning and publication of NSRN blog.
Katja is a PhD candidate in the School of Social Science at Western Sydney University. She completed her Magister (Master equivalent) degree in Contemporary History, Political Science and Anthropology of the Americas at the Free University Berlin, Germany. Her PhD research is on Gender and Inclusion in Non-Religious groups in Australia. Using qualitative data collection, she investigates the lived experiences of women in atheist and humanist groups.
Katja is interested in learning about how gender relations within the groups are perceived by atheist and/or humanist women and how they negotiate their role. Additionally, she looks into diversity in the non-religious community in Australia.
She previously published on the Atheist Bus Campaign in New Zealand.
Social Research Institute, University College London, United Kingdom
Nadia Beider is a postdoctoral fellow at the Social Research Institute, University College London.
Her research focuses on religious change broadly defined to include denominational switching, conversion, and disaffiliation, tracing the motivation for such shifts and their sociological and demographic implications. She is particularly interested in the interactions between prior and current religious identities and the ways in which religious switching shapes attitudes and behaviors.
Nic is a PhD candidate at Purdue University in the Department of Sociology.
Drawing on literatures from political sociology, social movements, and the sociology of religion Nic’s research explores the heterogeneity of the religiously unaffiliated. Their dissertation studies the impact the rising numbers of the non-religious may have on the cultural and political landscape of the United States.
Former Team Members
We are very grateful for the service of our former team members:
Katie Aston (Anthropology, University of London, UK)
Anna Hennessey (Philosophy, California State University, Fresno, USA)
NSRN Online 