ACI is pleased to announce that the Cardijn Lecture for 2023 will be presented on Thursday 13 December 2023 by Dr Alana Harris from King’s College London.
The topic of her lecture will be “Reform or Revolution? The English Young Christian Students and their Pursuit of a Spiritual ’68.”
Full registration details below.
Dr Alana Harris

Originally from Shepparton, Victoria, Dr Alana Harris is a Reader in Modern British Social, Cultural, and Gender History at King’s College London, having previously acted as the Director of Liberal Arts and taught as a Fellow at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.
She has authored eight books, including the pathbreaking Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism, 1945-1982 (MUP, 2013) and her most recent publication, The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, 1914-2021 (OUP, 2023).
Adopting an interdisciplinary and intersectional methodology to explore ‘lived religion’, she has emerged as one of the foremost practitioners of this approach, which combines insights from anthropology and ethnography, sociology and the emergent history of emotions.
A distinctive expertise as the foremost historian of modern British Catholicism was forged through her doctoral studies on the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the devotional lives of English Catholics and consolidated through a chapter on English Catholicism (and the liturgical movement) within Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Timothy Matovina and Robert A. Orsi’s Catholics in the Vatican II Era: Local Histories of a Global Event (CUP, 2017).
With Niall Coll (Bishop of Ossory), she co-authored two chapters on British and Irish Catholicism (English and German translation) to be published next year in the 12 volume international series Vatican II – Legacy and Mandate (2024).
Her broader research specialisms, advanced in numerous book chapters and journal articles, encompass histories of gender and sexuality; ethnicity and migration; devotional cultures; pilgrimage; urban religiosity and material religion.

Webinar Details
Thursday 14 December 2023, 7pm AEDT (8am UK)
Registration link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAlde2pqToqHdxgaJyR1gi8SFwCuNNW3XyK
Previous Cardijn Lectures
2022: Cardinal Michael Czerny SJ, Siblings All, Signs of the Times – The Social Teaching of Pope Francis
2021: Professor Rafael Luciani, The emergence of synodality
