Staff
Director
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1170
Email: j.bering@qub.ac.uk
Jesse Bering's webpage
Dr. Jesse Bering is a Reader in the School of History and Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture. His postgraduate studies focused on the psychological differences between human beings and chimpanzees, and this early exposure to comparative psychology, combined with his PhD in developmental psychology, led to his work studying how the evolved human mind plays a part in religious thinking. He is the author of numerous scientific articles on topics ranging from the afterlife to university students' conceptions of destiny. His general science writings have appeared widely in popular media outlets. Dr. Bering also writes a featured weekly blog for Scientific American Mind called "Bering in Mind". His first book Under God's Skin: The Hidden Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in Autumn, 2010.
Assistant Director
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1304
Email: p.sousa@qub.ac.uk
Paulo's webpage
Dr. Paulo Sousa is Assistant Director of the ICC and Lecturer in cognitive anthropology in the School of Anthropological Studies. He has participated in many cross-cultural projects and has published numerous articles in the field of cognition and culture. He has also applied an epidemiological approach to the history of ideas of anthropology that has stimulated a major controversy. His research interests focus on folk conceptions of mind, agency and morality, religious representations and kinship relatedness. He is currently writing a book on the folk concept of moral responsibility (in the sense of culpability).
Distinguished International Fellow
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1173
Email: graham.macdonald@canterbury.ac.nz
Prof. Graham Macdonald is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury. His research interests are primarily in the philosophy of mind, aspects of the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of social science. He co-authored Semantics and Social Science (1980) with Philip Pettit, edited Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A.J.Ayer (1979), and co-edited Fact, Science, and Morality (1986), Philosophy of Psychology and Connectionism (1995), and Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals (2005). Forthcoming work includes two co-edited volumes: McDowell and his Critics (2006), and Teleosemantics: New Philosophical Essays (2006).
Honorary Professor
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1303
Email: t.lawson@qub.ac.uk
Prof. E. Thomas Lawson is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Religion at W. Michigan University. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture and the founder of the cognitive science of religion field and of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. He also played a leading role in the establishment of departments of religion at public universities in the United States during the 1960s. He has published the books Religions of Africa: Traditions in Transformation (1984) and, with Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (1990) and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Ritual Forms (2002).
Honorary Professor
Phone: +44 (0) 18 6527 4678
Email: harvey.whitehouse@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Harvey's webpage
Prof. Harvey Whitehouse is Professor of Social Anthropology and Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, and Honorary Professor in the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s. He was the founding Director of the ICC, and has created a complementary institute at Oxford – Centre for Anthropology and Mind. A specialist in Melanesian religion, he carried out two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain, Papua New Guinea in the late eighties. His books include: Inside the Cult (1995), Arguments and Icons (2000), and Modes of Religiosity (2004).
Senior Research Scientist
Email: j.mort@qub.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1314
Dr. Joel Mort (PhD, Western Michigan University) is a Senior Research Fellow at the ICC. In addition he is a Research Scientist in the Cognitive Systems Branch of the US Air Force Research Laboratory and a Research Scholar at the Culture and Cognition Lab in Wright State University's Department of Psychology. Currently he is engaged in two major research projects. His project, Cultural Variations in Vigilance and Precaution Themes (with Prof E. Thomas Lawson) examines (1) inter- and intra-variation of dominant potential danger and precautionary theme preoccupations and the continuity between individual precautionary measures and collective rituals. He is also a core researcher in the AHRC funded Culture and the Mind Project. Research for both projects span sites in S. Africa, Tanzania, USA, UK, and potentially Israel and South East Asia.
Clerical/Technical Staff
Phone: +44 (0) 28 90 97 1333
Fax: +44 (0) 28 90 97 1332
Email: s.gavaghan@qub.ac.uk
Shane Gavaghan provides clerical support for staff and students in the Institute of Cognition and Culture.