Mark Wood

David Mark Wood

Qualifications

BA (1st Class Honours) Theology and Geography, Queen's University Belfast (2008)

Postgraduate Research Student

Email: dwood02@qub.ac.uk

Address

Room 02 032, Elmwood Building
School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology (GAP)
Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast BT7 1NN
Northern Ireland, UK

Current Teaching:

I currently assist with the following modules:

• GGY2028 Contemporary approaches to geographical enquiry
• GGY1006 Researching Globalisation

 

Current Research: Society, Space and Culture

Science and Religion, 1874-1895: Towards a Comparative Geography of Public Spectacle

Supervisors

Professor David Livingstone

Dr. Diarmid Finnegan

 

Research aim

By attending to geographical particularities, and illustrating how local regional factors inflected the relationship between evolutionary science and religion between 1874 and 1895, this thesis aims to develop a more discriminating historical cartography of science-religion engagements.  What is hoped, therefore, is that we might be in a position to make greater sense of religious responses to scientific claims, and vice versa.

 

Outline

I suggest that historical studies concerned with the relationship between Christianity and science in the late nineteenth century could seriously benefit from a geographical approach.  This thesis will use, therefore, a number of public spectacles to assess how science-religion encounters were spatially inflected across a variety of spatial scales during the period 1874-1895.  These include:

 

• John Tyndall, Belfast, 1874
• Alfred Robertson Fitchett and the Dunedin YMCA, 1876,
• Alexander Winchell, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, 1878
• Henry Drummond, Scotland, 1883 & 1894-5

 

Such an approach finds support in the writings of John Brooke.  As he puts it: ‘There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion.  It is what different individuals and communities have made of it in a plethora of different contexts’ (Science and religion, p. 321).  Thomas Dixon too advocates such an approach.  He presses for an historical inquiry that is ‘as sensitive as possible to the influence of temporal and geographic particulars: local history is the order of the day’ (‘Looking beyond “the rumpus about Moses and monkeys”’, p. 26).  Thus by inserting spatiality, and by being sensitive to the ways in which local regional factors conditioned this relationship, this thesis aims to develop a more discriminating historical cartography of science-religion engagements.

Additional Information:

1st place CCEA A-Level Geography 2005;

BA (First Class Honours) Theology and Geography (QUB 2008);

Recipient of the 2008 Institute of Theology (QUB) Scholarship for academic excellence at undergraduate level;

Recipient of 2009 Alan Graham Travel Scholarship (QUB).

Recipient of  the 75th Anniversary Field Work Prize 2009 (GAP).