Alexis Artaud de La Ferrièr

Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Portsmouth
Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Portsmouth.

Prior to joining the University of Portsmouth in 2020, he was Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. Alexis obtained his BA in Philosophy and English at the University of Sheffield. He pursued his graduate stuides at the University of Cambridge, where he also worked as Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of International Relations in the Middle East and North Africa (CIRMENA).

Alexis’s research interests encompass the sociology of religion, the sociology of education, and social and political theory. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the politicisation of primary schools in Algeria during the War of Independence (1954-62), and his first post-doctoral project investigated practices of Internet surveillance and censorship in Tunisia following the fall of the Ben Ali regime.

Alexis’s current research focuses on the contemporary transformations of Catholicism in France and in North Africa. In France, Alexis’s work focuses on the politicisation of Catholic communities, on Catholic engagement with the political public sphere, and on the internal transformations of Catholicism as a result of immigration. He is a co-investigator on the RELIMIG project, which investigates the social and religious trajectories of Catholic migrants in France and is funded by the French National Research Agency. In North Africa, Alexis’s research investigates how the institutional Catholic Church has evolved, in its ecclesiology and in its missiology, following the national independence of former French colonies (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco) and the associated collapse of Catholic lay congregations.

Alexis is a Research Associate at the Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités in Paris. He is also a board member of the Association Française de Sciences sociales des religions.