Bryan Turner

Bryan Stanley Turner, born in 1945 in Birmingham, England, is a British sociologist and social theorist. He studied sociology at the University of Leeds and received his doctorate from the same university with a thesis on the decline of Methodism.

Turner has taught and conducted research at various universities and research centres in Britain, Australia, Singapore, Europe and the United States. He has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, Professor of Social and Political Thought at Western Sydney University, and Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His main research areas are the sociology of religion, social theory, globalization, citizenship, human rights, Islam and the sociology of the body.

Among his important works are Weber and Islam, The Body and Society, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, Religion and Modern Society and Vulnerability and Human Rights. In these works Turner shows that religion, the body, citizenship and human rights must be understood in connection with power, modernity, the state and globalization.

Turner’s significance in contemporary sociology lies especially in having made the body a central axis of social analysis and in demonstrating that many modern issues—from health and medicine to identity, discipline, citizenship and religion—are formulated in relation to the body. In the study of religion and Islam he has also sought to move beyond purely Orientalist frameworks and to examine religion within the context of modernity, the state and global transformations.