Alex Norman

Alex completed his doctorate at the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney in 2010. Since then he has lectured at the Department of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, and the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at the University of Western Sydney before returning to the University of Sydney from 2012-2014. He has taught subjects focussing on religions since 2006, including units on Classical Hinduism, Witchcraft, Paganism, the New Age, and Christianity in the Middle Ages. In 2008 he was awarded the Faculty of Arts Teaching Excellence Award, and in 2011 was a finalist for the Rita and John Cornforth Medal for PhD excellence and contributions to the University community.

He currently works in the Graduate Research School teaching the core units for the Master of Research degree where he is able to engage one of his passions in life; research knowledge translation.

Alex’s central research interests focus on the confluence of travel practices and religious practices. His book Spiritual Tourism (Continuum 2011) examines the intersection of travel and secular spiritual practice by contemporary Westerners. He has published on the Camino de Santiago, World Youth Day, and on the religious dimensions in Olympic tourism. His other main research interest is in new religious movements. In 2010 he published the first scholarly article on the group Great Freedom (now known as Balanced View), and in 2012 he co-edited the Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production (Brill 2012) with Prof. Carole M. Cusack.

Recently Alex learned the supreme joy of coding and fell in love with the R programming language. He has just had a paper accepted in Psychological Methods on network analysis of codes applied to interview material. The R code for the network analysis was written by Alex and his co-author Dr Jennifer Pokorny.

He is currently co-Editor of the International Journal for the Study of New Religions, and the Managing Editor of the Journal of Sociology.

This information has been contributed by Doctor Norman.