Overview

Paul Robertson is a scholar of ancient Mediterranean thought and the theory of religion, with current research in cognitive historiography and the intersection of religious beliefs and cultural responses to science and technology.

He received a Ph.D. from Brown University in Religious Studies (2013), and is currently Lecturer in Humanities & Classics at the University of New Hampshire. He teaches courses straddling science and religion, most recently “Cognitive Science of Religion,” “Cognition and Culture,” and “Mysticism East and West,” all of which explore differing cultural manifestations of evolutionary psychology, types of religious belief, and the intersection of global and local understandings.

“Cognition and Culture” received a Templeton award for curricular development as part of the Global Religion Research Initiative via the University of Notre Dame, and forms the core of a current book project comparing how areas of cultural encounter and change are mediated by the variable intersections of universal cognitive principles and particularistic cultural-religious elements.

Previous books (2019, 2016) theorised comparison of religions by combining quantitative, qualitative, and humanistic methods, and recent articles treat cognitive historiography and the comparison of ancient and modern understandings of religion.