Rate My Professor Linda Woodhead

Professor Linda Woodhead MBE FBA FRSE FAcSS is the F.D. Maurice Professor in Moral and Social Theology in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London, to which she was appointed in 2021. She earned a Double First at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Previously, Woodhead was Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University. She has held visiting positions at the Universities of Münster, Ottawa, Princeton, Stanford, Bern, Hanover, Lucerne, and Manila. From 2007 to 2012, she directed the £17 million AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme. Her research interests include religion, magic, and spirituality; values and ethics; contemporary religious and cultural change in Britain and beyond; and gods, spirits, good, and evil.

Woodhead’s key publications encompass Unknowing God: Towards a Post-Abusive Theology (2022, with Peter Harvey), Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age (2021, with Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, and Jane Shaw), The Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global Society (2021, editor with Jayeel Cornelio, Francois Gauthier, and Tuomas Martikainen), That Was the Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People (2016, with Andrew Brown), Messy Methods in Researching Religion (2025, editor with Lucy Cadman and Nicole Graham), and The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (2005, with Paul Heelas). She has received the MBE, Fellowship of the British Academy (2022), Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022), Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences, and honorary DLitt degrees from the Universities of Oslo and Uppsala. A prominent public intellectual, Woodhead appears regularly in the media on religion, culture, and values, co-founded the Westminster Faith Debates with the Rt Hon Charles Clarke, and leads projects including an AHRC-funded study on abuse in religious settings, organizational cultures, public policy, and survivors’ experiences.