Staff profile
Ricky Whitefield
Junior Research Fellow
| Affiliation | Telephone |
|---|---|
| Junior Research Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion | +44 (0) 191 33 41210 |
| Junior Research Fellow of St John's College | |
| Advisory Board Member in the Centre for Death and Life Studies | |
| Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing | |
| Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities | |
| Postgraduate Fellow in the Institute for Medical Humanities |
Biography
After an initial B.A. degree in Theology and Religious Studies at Durham (2014-18), I moved to Keble College, Oxford, to pursue an M.Phil. in Modern Theology (2018-2020), specialising in the theological reception of phenomenological discourses of 'depth', 'meaning', and 'value' in the early-mid twentieth century, not least in terms of 'identity', 'ecstasy', and 'knowledge formation' in the works of Karl Jaspers, Alfred Schütz, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Tillich. Disrupted by Covid-19, I returned to Durham with haste to join the lay-monastic community of St Antony's Priory (2020-2022). I also became a Junior Research Fellow and part-time teacher in the Department of Theology and Religion (2020-2025). After my time at St Antony's, I embarked on a part-time M.A. in Social Anthropology at Durham in order to advance my social research training and to take my studies of 'meaning' and 'value' in new directions, not least through an investigation of their opposites. This longer-term project concerns the production and perception of 'meaninglessness' in social life (not meant in any nihilistic sense of the term) but simply those aspects of the lifeworld in which meaning is not found, where a difference is not made or recognised. It is thus an ideal context for the study of a whole range of social marginalia: indifference, impasse, standstill, moral loss or regress, thinness, and speed.
My current projects include:
- A book with Douglas Davies on ecology, memory, and British storytelling with new theoretical developments circling around an ethnographic case-study of the National Memorial Arboretum as a prime symbolic focus of British remembrance and for its self-awareness and self-narration.
- A four-volume collection with Mark Sandy et al on Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914, (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2025)
- Routledge Revivals edition on largely forgotten English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (1905-1985) also forthcoming 2025
- A chapter on ecologies of remembrance in Bomalaski, R., & Venters, A.M. (Eds.), Ritual Interventions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern Rites of Passage (Delaware: Vernon Press, forthcoming 2026).
- A chapter on the root-metaphor of the nation, with wider reflections on the nature of 'truth' as 'depth' -- also forthcoming 2026.
- Current discussions around a multivolume collection on 19th century reception and imagination of the subject (human and non-human), circling round emerging themes in my own work on mortality, mind, mystery and memory, and their intellectual, social, emotional, and material histories across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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