My research has illuminated different dimensions of the encounter between secularism and religion in modern Europe. My first monograph Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession, Cambridge UP, 2014 (winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize for Cultural History) argued for the insertion of secularism into German religious history, not just as a force acting against the existing Christian confessions, but as a confessional force in its own right.

Over the past decade, I have been pushing this work into the twentieth century, demonstrating that the interwar period marked a second “culture war” in German history. My second monograph was Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 and 1933 (Cambridge UP, 2023). It examines the role of secularism in sociailst culture, and concludes by showing that antisecularism was a key element in the organization and radicalization of the political right in the late Weimar Republic.

More recently, I have been developing a research project on is the history of Weltanschauung/worldview in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

As former director of the Centre for Religion and Heritage, I develop a series of collaborations with NGOs and university partners on the relationship of heritage to current transformations of the religious field, such as secularization, the rise of the postsecular, minority heritage and interreligious dialogue.