Dr Anna Rowlands is lecturer in Contemporary Catholic Studies and deputy director of the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham.
She is also the founding chair of a national network organisation, the Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice, that links together academics and practitioners committed to developing Catholic social teaching in the academy and throughout civil society.
She teaches political theology and her research focuses on migration, religion and politics, Catholic and Anglican social traditions, concepts of the common good and human dignity and the work of social philosophers Gillian Rose and Hannah Arendt.
She works with a range of civil society groups including Citizens UK, Caritas, CAFOD, Christians in Parliament, Together for the Common Good, and the Jesuit Refugee Service.
Her forthcoming books include: Political Theology: A Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017, edited with Elizabeth Phillips and Amy Daunton) and Catholic Social Teaching: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2017).
She writes for online sources including the ABC Religion and Ethics blog on contemporary issues including (recently) Brexit, the ‘refugee crisis’, public policy approaches to migration, post liberalism and populism.
Her major funded research project at the moment is a collaborative study of refugee hosting and the role of religion in local responses to displacement in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan (www.refugeehosts.org).
She is also working with the Jesuit Refugee Service on destitution and detention among UK asylum seekers.