Dr Suzanne Owen

Qualifications

Overview

My PhD from Edinburgh University focussed on the significance of protocols in the sharing of Native American ceremonies derived from Lakota and other Plains Indian traditions and debates about non-native ‘appropriations’ of them.  This research also included fieldwork among Mi'kmaq in Newfoundland, Canada.  More recently, I have been researching British Druidry in relation to indigeneity and religion.

My next project has taken me back to Newfoundland to research visual representations of the Beothuk, an indigenous group now culturally extinct due to the impact of colonisation. However, they continue to be remembered and made present through art, literature and museum exhibitions, often at the expense of the Mi’kmaq and other First Nations.

I am also interested in shamanism as a cross-cultural category and have maintained an interest in Indic and Buddhist traditions, which I specialised in during my undergraduate studies at Edinburgh University. I started working at Leeds Trinity University in 2008 and remain part-time there since joining Chester’s TRS department in September 2013.

I am co-chair of the Indigenous Religious Traditions Group at the American Academy of Religion and coordinating editor of DISKUS, the journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions.