Department of Study of Religion
The Department of Study of Religion is a part of the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies in the Faculty of Humanities. Our premises are located in the Arcanium building.
Study of Religion is a multidisciplinary field of research that examines the dynamics of religious phenomena in all times and cultures. The Department of Study of Religion at the University of Turku examines the broad variety of religious, spiritual and secular worldviews as well as ideologies and movements in their changing environments. Apart from the things commonly regarded as religious, scholars in Study of Religion can apply their analytical tools to examine a great variety of social and cultural phenomena by engaging with a wide selection of research methods and theories from social sciences and art studies to philosophy, economics, history and psychology.
The Department of Study of Religion at the University of Turku has always been an anthropologically and ethnographically oriented subject. We often collect our primary research data by means of ethnographical methods of observation and interviews. However, the study of religion is continuously being constructed in dialogue with a variety of scholarly traditions and approaches using textual, historical and archival materials as well as media and works of art.