Jolyon Mitchell joins us as visiting fellow

Professor Jolyon Mitchell specialises in Religion, Violence and Peacebuilding, with particular reference to the arts and media. Educated at the Universities of Cambridge (Selwyn), Durham (St John’s) and Edinburgh, Jolyon worked as a Producer and Journalist with BBC World service and Radio 4 before moving to the University of Edinburgh. He is currently Director of CTPI (the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Edinburgh), and a former President of TRS-UK (2012-2018 - the national association for Theology and Religious Studies in the UK).

He is author of many books, chapters and articles, including Promoting Peace and Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (Routledge, 2012); Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012); Religion and War: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2021) and Media Violence and Christian Ethics (CUP, 2007). His most recent edited book is The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Peace (2022). He is currently finishing a book on Theatre (Passion Play: The Mysterious Resurgence of Religious Drama, OUP, 2024) and editing Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding (Bloomsbury, 2024). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a life member of Clare Hall, at the University of Cambridge. Ordained within the Scottish Episcopal Church, he has served as an NSM at a number of churches for nearly three decades, including St James, Leith and currently St John’s, Edinburgh.

Jolyon has also served on international film juries at the Cannes, Berlin and Venice film festivals. He directs a number of projects on Peacebuilding, including one which led to the widely used co-edited volume on Peacebuilding and the Arts (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). He has recently been working with Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders, as well as Palestinian and Israeli journalists, on a peace building project in Jerusalem, the West Bank and beyond. A former marathon runner, he loves teaching and has supervised and worked with numerous PhD students, Post-Doctoral fellows and Ordinands, and lectured all over the world.