Mapping Religion in the Global Anglophone Novel

The Mapping Religion in the Global Anglophone Novel (MaRGAN) project unites two features of the twentieth century: the rise of the novel as a global form and religious change following the impact of modernity upon religious practice. The connection between the two has often been difficult to record because what religion means differs from scholar to scholar and from context to context.

In its initial phase, MaRGAN will define a corpus of approximately 400 global anglophone novels published between 1890 and 1980 that engage with religion. The database powering the website categorizes these engagements using one or more pre-defined religious keywords (i.e., ritual) and annotates the novel’s relation to this keyword using free text. In addition, the database captures basic bibliographic information about the novels and biographic data about the author. The project thus assumes that the nature and value of a given representation of religion in a novel is responsive to the geographical, historical, and religious contexts of the author.

The data is visualised in three ways: a timeline (to allow for developments over the 100 years of the project); word clouds (to reveal the frequency of certain keywords with respect to religion in novels); and a map (to allow for exploration of the geographical global).

For this project, I serve as the database designer and lead web developer. I built a collaborative editing environment and public-facing website—which was launched at the Modernist Studies Association conference in July 2026—to meet the project’s collaborative editing, research metadata, and infrastructure needs.

The project team includes myself, Elizabeth Anderson (University of Aberdeen, UK), Jamie Callison (University of Agder, Norway), Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary University of London, UK), and Mimi Winick (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA).

Visit the site at ghjensen.github.io/margan.