Joel Barnes is Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia. His work on the project examines the history of relations between religion and evolutionary science within Australian higher education.

Before joining the University of Queensland, Joel was a Research Associate in the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney, working on an Australian Research Council-funded project on the history of humanities institutions in Australia since 1945, for which he is finalising a monograph on the humanities disciplines and the idea of the national interest.