Graham Harvey

Graham Harvey (born 25 August 1959) is an English religious studies scholar. He specialises in modern Paganism, indigenous religions and animism.

Life and work Graham Harvey was born in 1959. He obtained a Ph.D. title at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1991 on a dissertation about group identity in ancient Jewish literature. From 1991 to 1995 he taught religious studies in Newcastle. From 1996 to 2003 he worked as a reader and principal lecturer in religious studies at the King Alfred's College, Winchester. Since 2003 he works at the Open University where he is a professor and was head of the religious studies department from 2013 to 2017.

After being invited to do a presentation about contemporary druids, Harvey began to do fieldwork about modern Paganism which resulted in several books, notably Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism (1997) and Researching Paganisms (2004). In the monograph Food, Sex & Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013) he seeks to define religion through people's behaviours and everyday practices rather than belief.

Harvey practices modern Paganism with druid orders and as animism with ecological activists. He is married and also participates in Jewish celebrations with his wife.

Selected publications Monographs The True Israel: Uses of the Names Jew, Hebrew and Israel in Ancient Jewish and Early Christian Literature, Brill, 1996 Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism, Hurst, 1997 Animism: Respecting the Living World, Hurst, 2005 What do Pagans Believe?, Granta, 2007 Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life, Routledge, 2013

Edited volumes Words Remembered, Texts Renewed: Festschrift for Prof John F.A. Sawyer, with Jon Davies and Wilfred G. E. Watson, Sheffield Academic Press, 1995 Paganism Today: Witches, Druids, the Goddess and Ancient Earth Traditions for the Twenty-First Century, with Charlotte Hardman, Thorsons, 1996 Indigenous Religions: A Companion, Cassell, 2000 Law and Religion in Contemporary Society: Communities, Individualism and the State, with Peter W. Edge, Ashgate, 2000 Indigenous religious musics, with Karen Ralls-MacLeod, Ashgate, 2000 Shamanism: A Reader, Routledge, 2003 Historical Dictionary of Shamanism, with Robert Wallis, Scarecrow, 2004 Researching Paganisms, with Jenny Blain and Douglas Ezzy, AltaMira, 2004 The Paganism Reader, with Chas S. Clifton, Routledge, 2004 Ritual and Religious Belief: a reader, Equinox, 2005 Indigenous diasporas and dislocations, with Charles D. Thompson Jr, Ashgate, 2005 Religions in Focus: New Approaches to Tradition and Contemporary Practices, Equinox, 2009 Handbook of Contemporary Animism, Acumen, 2013 Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture, with Paul-François Tremlett and Liam T. Sutherland, Bloomsbury, 2017 Sensual Religion: Religion and the Five Senses, with Jessica Hughes, Equinox, 2018 Indigenizing Movements in Europe, Equinox, 2020 Reassembling Democracy: Ritual and Cultural Resource, with Michael Houseman, Sarah M. Pike and Jone Salomonsen, Bloomsbury, 2020