Staff Members

Professor Douglas Pratt

Role: Professor Qualifications: BA Auck and Waik, MA Auck, BD Otago, LTh(Hons) NZ, PhD StAnd DTheol Melb Coll of Divinity Email: dpratt@waikato.ac.nz Location: J3.13 Contact: 8146

Research Interests:

Professor Pratt’s research interests focus on aspects of Christianity, Islam, Christian-Muslim relations, interreligious dialogue, and contemporary religious issues such as pluralism, fundamentalism and extremism. He is currently the President of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion (AASR). He is also the New Zealand Associate of the UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations – Asia Pacific (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia) and an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Inquiry where he has research links to the Global Terrorism Research Centre and the Centre for Islam in the Modern World. Professor Pratt is an Associate of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

Professor Pratt was appointed Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Bern, Switzerland, for the Spring semester (February - June) 2011. During the Spring semester of 2010 (January – May) he was in the United States as a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

Dr Pratt spent a term in 2004 as Visiting Lecturer in Christian–Muslim Relations at the University of Birmingham, UK, and for the academic year 2005-06 was Visiting Research Fellow at Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford and a guest lecturer in Issues in Interfaith Relations for the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford. He has previously studied and taught at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and has been a visiting scholar at the International Islamic University, Malaysia, and the Pontifical Institute for the Study of Arabic and Islam, Rome.

Professor Pratt is a regular visitor to Australia where he has been a consultant on religious fundamentalism and extremism to the Australian Federal Government and a guest presenter to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and FBI Leadership in Counter-Terrorism – Pacific program. He has presented special seminars and lectures in recent years at both Monash University (Melbourne) and The University of Western Sydney. He is the Book Review editor for the Monash editorial team of the international Routledge journal Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.

Among numerous research and writing projects, Professor Pratt is a co-editor of a major re-publication series of classic texts in the field of Islamic Studies – Exploring the House of Islam: Perceptions of Islam in the Period of Western Ascendancy 1800-1945 – published by Gorgias Press, New Jersey, USA, and a co-editor and contributor to a major book, Understanding Interreligious Relations, to be published by OUP in 2013.

Selected Publications:

Sole authored books: The Church and Other Faiths: The World Council of Churches, the Vatican, and Interreligious Dialogue (Peter Lang, 2010); Civilisational Dialogue and the Philosophy of Religion (University of Malaya, 2009); The Challenge of Islam: Encounters in Interfaith Dialogue (Ashgate, 2005); Rethinking Religion: Exploratory Investigations (ATF Press, 2004).

Co-authored book: Religious Diversity in Southeast Asia and the Pacific: National Case Studies (Springer Academic Publishers, 2010)

Research Publications:

You may like to view publications from 1997 onwards for Professor Douglas Pratt

Expertise:

Current undergraduate papers taught

World Religions; Islam; Religion in New Zealand; Philosophy of Religion