Jane Shaw is a cultural and intellectual historian, writing primarily on religion in the modern period. Her current project looks at the revival of mysticism in the early twentieth century and analyses that revival as part of a broader movement away from institutional religion and towards ‘spirituality’. This will result in the book Seeking Infinity: Mystics in the Modern World (under contract with Penguin Allen Lane).

Her previous books include the co-authored and interdisciplinary Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in the Digital Age (U of Chicago Press, 2022); Octavia , Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers (Jonathan Cape & Yale, 2011), a group biography based on the previously unknown archive of an early twentieth-century millenarian community; and Miracles in Enlightenment England (Yale, 2006).

Shaw is Professor of the History of Religion at the University of Oxford and, until recently, was also Principal of Harris Manchester College and a Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Oxford. Previously, she was Professor of Religious Studies, Professor of History (by courtesy), and Dean for Religious Life at Stanford University; Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco; and prior to that taught history and theology at Oxford for sixteen years. She has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley and has held visiting research fellowships at the ANU Humanities Research Centre, the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, the University of Melbourne, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and the Clayman Institute at Stanford.

Jane Shaw is in residence in the autumn of 2025.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.