Dr Mathew Guest is Reader in the Sociology of Religion within Durham University’s Department of Theology and Religion, where he has taught since 2004.
He has published widely on the sociology of Christianity in late modern western cultures, focusing especially on the evangelical movement and religion within university contexts. He is the author or editor of six books, including Evangelical Identity and Contemporary Culture: A Congregational Study in Innovation (2007), Bishops, Wives and Children: Spiritual Capital Across the Generations (2007, with Douglas Davies) and Christianity and the University Experience: Understanding Student Faith (2013, with Kristin Aune, Sonya Sharma and Rob Warner).
His research is bound together by a concern for the major institutional phenomena that frame how religious identities are perpetuated, sustained and subverted within the British context. He was Principal Investigator on the ‘Christianity and the University Experience in Contemporary England’ project (funded by the AHRC and ESRC), and on an HEA funded project on ‘Gender and Career Progression in Theology and Religious Studies’; he is co-investigator on ‘Chaplains on Campus’, a project funded by the Church Universities’ Fund, as well as being co-investigator on the ‘Re/presenting Islam on Campus’ project. In 2013 he was visiting research fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.
Mathew Guest is also a Quaker, a member of Durham local Quaker Meeting and serves as Quaker chaplain at Durham University. As a Quaker, he is involved in a number of social justice campaigns, chiefly through Tyne and Wear Citizens – the north east chapter of Citizens UK – and the Northern Friends Peace Board, which encourages the active promotion of peace in all its height and breadth, and for which he is a member of the executive board and a trustee. Mathew Guest is a fellow of the RSA.