Dr Alastair Lockhart 

Alastair Lockhart is the College’s Senior Postgraduate Tutor and a College Lecturer in Modern History. His research focus is in 20th century religious history with a special interest in new and non-mainstream belief and the psychology of religion. He has worked extensively on the archives of the Panacea Society, an apocalyptic and millenarian group based in Bedford, UK, which was active from the 1920s and closed as a religious organisation in 2012. His monograph, Personal Religion and Spiritual Healing: The Panacea Society in the Twentieth Century (State University of New York Press, 2019), used letters written to the Society to investigate the religious and metaphysical thinking of people around the world across the 20th century. He has also published critical and historical work in the psychology of religion, and he is editor of the Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements – an open access encyclopedia of apocalyptic and millenarian movements from ancient times to the present.

Alastair studied undergraduate Theology and Religious Studies at Cambridge before an MSc in Computer Sciences and an MA in the Psychology of Religion, both at the University of London. Following doctoral research in Cambridge on the relationship between religious, psychological and philosophical thinking from the early-nineteenth century up to 1939, he was a Research Associate and then an Affiliated Lecturer in the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Prior to joining Churchill in 2023, he was a Fellow and Tutor at Hughes Hall, a postgraduate and mature undergraduate college of the University.