Kerrie Handasyde is an Associate Professor of History and the Academic Dean at Pilgrim Theological College. She researches religious history with interests in gender and Christianity, culture and the intersections of secular and sacred, and the denominations of Protestant Dissent and related churches in Australia and the Pacific.
Kerrie’s research on gender history and feminist theology has led to the publication of co-edited volumes including Feminist Theologies: A Companion (with Katharine Massam and Stephen Burns; SCM Press, 2024) and Contemporary Feminist Theologies: Power, Authority, Love (with Cathryn McKinney and Rebekah Pryor; Routledge 2021), as well as chapters in Women in Christianity in the Modern Age, 1920–today, edited by Lisa Isherwood and Megan Clay (Routledge 2021) and articles in journals such as Lilith: A Feminist History Journal.
Kerrie’s work at the intersection of sacred and secular includes a co-edited volume Seeing Christ in Australia since 1850 (with Sean Winter; Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), a special issue on “Dialogues of Secular and Sacred: Christianity in mid-20th Century Australian Culture” in the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion (with Katharine Massam; 2022), and a chapter on the historiography of Protestant Dissent within broader Australian history writing in The Gospel in the Past: Essays on the Historiography of the Evangelical Movement, edited by David Bebbington (Baylor University Press, 2025). She is also part of the research team for the Worldviews Literacy Lab in the Faculty of Education at The University of Melbourne.
Kerrie’s research on the denominations of Protestant Dissent and related churches in Australia and the Pacific focuses on a wide variety of religious literature and material culture, considering themes of social justice activism, peace, environment, and mission history. Her monograph, God in the Landscape: Studies in the Literary History of Australian Protestant Dissent (Bloomsbury 2021), explores how faith is essentially ‘placed’ and looks at expressions of spirituality and belief in diverse media including Holy Land travel writing by Churches of Christ ministers, film and promotional material produced by the Salvation Army, wartime poetry by women of the Congregational church, Methodist adventure fiction, and art and natural history illustration within the Quaker tradition. She has also published extensively on the history of the Churches of Christ in Australia, part of the Stone-Campbell Movement, including a number of commissioned books and a denominational history periodical for a general readership and scholarly peer-reviewed articles in Journal of Religious History, Pneuma: Journal for the Society of Pentecostal Studies, Melbourne Historical Journal, Victorian Historical Journal, Australian Journal of Liturgy, and the Stone-Campbell Journal. She is a Research Fellow of the Australasian Centre for Wesleyan Research and a member of the Sugden Heritage Committee at Queens College.
Research supervision: Kerrie invites research proposals on the history of Christianity since the 1700s, especially including the denominations of Protestant Dissent, women and the church, or the Stone-Campbell Movement. Approaches that incorporate material culture, religious literature and music, social justice or environmental history, or consideration of the intersections of the sacred and secular are particularly welcome.
Kerrie always tries to make the classroom a welcoming and inclusive space. With her background in education, Kerrie takes a student-focused approach and employs contemporary approaches in her teaching. She seeks to enable students to make sense of the present through better understanding the past, and to confront and reconcile where possible the challenging aspects of the Church’s past.
University Appointments
- Coordinator of Studies: History of Christianity (Pilgrim Theological College)