Tony Watling

Tony Watling trained in Anthropology at University College London from 1988-1991, receiving a BSc degree. He undertook his PhD ('Negotiating Religious Pluralism: The Dialectical Development of Religious Identities in the Netherlands') at the University of London from 1993-1999, undertaking ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands in 1994-5. From 1992-1994 and in 1997 he worked as a Teaching Assistant, Research Assistant, and Editorial Assistant, in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, where from 2000-2003 he was also a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, engaged in research on religious (Christian) responses to genetic engineering, undertaking ethnographic fieldwork in Scotland in 2001-2. While at UCL he was part of the Genomics, Anthropology and Technology research group and the Centre for Biosciences and Society. Since 2000 he has been a member of the British Sociological Association, Sociology of Religion Study Group (UK). From 2004 to 2007 he was a Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Research Fellow in the Faculty of Theology at Leiden University, where he researched religious and scientific views in public debates on ecology and the environment and was part of the Leiden Institute for the Study of Religions and the Research Group on the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics. His research interests and specialities include Catholic/Protestant identities and dialogue, ecumenism, women and religion, fundamentalism, the Alpha Course, world religions, religion and the ethics of genetic engineering, religion and ecology, science and ecology. He has published a variety of articles on much of these issues in various books and religious studies and sociology of religion journals in the UK, USA, and Europe.