Isabella Gregory (New Zealand)

I’m a student of contemporary religion and politics. Having completed my MSt in the Study of Religions (2023/24) with the support of the Ertegun Scholarship, I’ve now progressed onto a DPhil (2024-27), funded by the Cecil Lubbock Scholarship at Trinity College and the Faculty of Theology & Religion. 

I work on religion and secularity in the politics of criminal punishment, under the guidance of my supervisors Maria Power and Naomi Waltham-Smith. Focussed primarily on the UK context, I consider how the justice system and its politics permit and foreclose different kinds of listening, hearing, speaking, and noise. I work in conversation with faith-based criminal justice practitioners and reformist/abolitionist activists around the UK, bringing their ideas together with scholarship in Critical Religion and feminist, decolonial, and Marxist accounts of state punishment. Through this, I have two key aims: to build a better understanding of the role of religion in the moral landscape of contemporary criminal punishment, and to understand something about why justice systems can be so resistant to radical change. Away from my DPhil project, I maintain an active interest in the social and economic conditions which fertilise conservative, reactionary, and far-right religio-political movements. My writing has appeared in Counterfutures and Radical Philosophy. 

I hold undergraduate degrees in religious studies and music from Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, where I returned for the first half of 2025 to lecture as a Teaching Fellow. Though I have loved my time in Oxford, I hope to see the forms of work done here continue to diversify, and meaningful access for students and academics from different backgrounds continue to widen. I’ve tutored on the IntoUniversity Explore Oxbridge programme for Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, and do some volunteering around Oxford in post-prison support. 

Before coming to Oxford, I was a keen orchestral flute player. I trained and performed in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the United States as a Fulbright scholar to the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University. Being part of Oxford’s vibrant music scene continues to bring me great joy. 

Prospective Oxford students from Aotearoa New Zealand and the surrounding region - or anyone working in areas related to my interests - should not hesitate to get in touch.