Professor Ruth Harris

Ruth Harris is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College and Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of four monographs and the recipient of the Wolfson Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. Her research explores the intersections of religion, politics, science, and culture in the modern world. Trained as a historian of modern France, she has worked across a wide range of fields, including the history of medicine and psychiatry, gender and religion, anti-Semitism and nationalism, and the relationship between political and religious belief. Her books have examined subjects as diverse as medical psychiatry, the apparitions and healing shrine of Lourdes, and the Dreyfus Affair. More recently, her work has turned to global and transnational history, particularly the intellectual and religious exchanges between Europe and India. Her biography of Swami Vivekananda explored the global circulation of ideas about spirituality, religion, and modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is currently completing The Oriental Christ: How Empire Remade Jesus and Modern Spirituality, which investigates how Indian thinkers and religious reformers reinterpreted Jesus under empire and, in doing so, transformed modern understandings of Christianity and spirituality across the world.