Iona Ramsay

I am a fourth-year AHRC-funded PhD student, supervised by Professor James Mark (University of Exeter) and Professor David Clarke (Cardiff University). I have a BA in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Religion in Global Politics from SOAS.

My PhD thesis examines ideas of spiritual resistance to communism and their role in the development and contestation of transnational illiberalism. More specifically, my thesis focuses on Romanian memory of ‘spiritual resistance’ in European and global context, tracing the circulation and repurposing of such ideas through transnational anti-communist memory cultures from the 1960s to the present day. In doing so, I aim to historicize the recent global rise of illiberalism and connect it to histories of the global Cold War, to interrogate the relationship between religion and populism, and to make sense of how memory of communism has been repurposed in illiberal movements around the world.

My wider research interests lie in the areas of global religious history, religious populism, and the relationship between religion and the politics of memory and time.