I am a Lecturer in Sociology here at Royal Holloway and an Associate Researcher at the Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (EPHE/CNRS) in Paris.

I am the President of the Association Française de Sciences Sociales des Religions and I sit on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Social Sciences and Missions. I am also a member of the Panel of Experts for the International Religious Liberty Association and a member of the Council of Experts for the International Association for the Defence of Religious Freedom.

My research interests revolve around the relationship between religion, politics, and society. Most of my work focuses on the sociology and contemporary history of Roman Catholicism, including dynamics of change within the Catholic Church, Catholic missiology, Catholic responses to international migration, post-colonial expressions of Catholicism, and the exchange of ideas between the Catholic Church and secular civil society and state institutions. I am also interested in Church-State relations, laïcité, freedom of religion and belief, and secularisation theory. Recently, I have conducted research into the French Catholic Chaplaincy for Migrants (as part of RELIMIG, a collaborative project investigating the social and religious trajectories of Catholic migrants led by Valérie Aubourg), the Catholic Church in Tunisia, the Scalabrinian Missionaries (with Blandine Cheleni-Pont), and the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on religious liberty in North America and Europe (with Nicholas Miller).

I am currently working on a research project into synodal governance & participation in the Roman Catholic Church.  

Office hours

Personal webpage

• https://sites.google.com/view/alexis-artaud-de-la-ferriere

• PhD, Cambridge

• MPhil, Cambridge

• BA (Hons), Sheffield

Current PhD students

• Jérémy Woloszyn, Catholicism and collective identities among Poles in Britain

• Church-state relations: secularisation, laïcité, freedom of religion and belief

• Catholicism

• Religion and politics in contemporary French society

• Christianity in North Africa

• Migration and religion

• Faith-based NGO's

• Sociology of Religion
• Research Methods for Social Scientists