Joseph Bulbulia

Joseph Bulbulia

Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor in the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past President of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a 20-year longitudinal study tracking over 15,000 New Zealanders each year. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016 Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University.

Bulbulia’s early work explained how features of religious beliefs and emotions make people more predictably cooperative with members of their group, and uncooperative with people regarded to be social threats. Later work quantified the effects of religion on social responses to test functional theories of religion.

Bulbulia was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968. He attended Canisius High School and received an AB in Philosophy from Holy Cross in 1990. He received a Master of Theological Studies degree from the Harvard University Divinity School in 1993, an M.A. from Princeton University in 1997, and a PhD from Princeton University in 2001. Bulbulia has taught at Victoria University and lived in New Zealand since 2000.

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