I am a researcher at the Department of Comparative Religion, University of Turku, Finland. My recent research has focused on 1) religion in the media, 2) the new visibility of atheism and 3) discursive study of the category of ‘religion’. I am the author of three Finnish-language monographs, editor of five volumes and author of more than 40 scholarly articles in English and Finnish.

My recent publications include:

Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred: Representation and Change. Ashgate 2013, co-authored with Kim Knott & Elizabeth Poole
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409448068

The Category of ‘Invented Religion’: A New Opportunity for Studying Discourses on ‘Religion’, Culture and Religion 14(4/2013): 477-493
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14755610.2013.838799#.U8ufGahF9bU

Making Space for Discursive Study in Religious Studies, Religion 43(1/2013): 26–45.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0048721X.2013.742744#.U8ufaahF-8U

New Atheism as Identity Politics, in Mathew Guest & Elisabeth Arweck (eds), Religion and Knowledge: Sociological Perspectives. Ashgate 2012, 97–113.
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=10832&edition_id=11164

More Visible but Limited in Its Popularity: Atheism (and Atheists) in Finland, Approaching Religion 2(1/2012): 21–35. https://ojs.abo.fi/index.php/ar/article/view/163 (Open access)

The Problem of Capitalism in the Scholarship on Contemporary Spirituality, Paul Heelas (ed.), Spirituality in the Modern World: Within Religious Tradition and Beyond. Abingdon: Routledge 2012, 93–105. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415490290/

Religion as a Discursive Technique: The Politics of Classifying Wicca, Journal of Contemporary Religion 25(3/2010): 379–394.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13537903.2010.516546#.U8uezqhF-8U

For more information, please visit my website: http://teemutaira.wordpress.com

You can also find me on academia.edu and Twitter (@teemutaira).

(Academia-link: http://utu.academia.edu/TeemuTaira)