Dr J. Copier (Jorien)

Jorien is Assistant Professor of Empirical and Practical Religious Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies. Her research focuses on religious communication: the ways in which people search for, find, and use language to speak about what they experience as sacred. Her work explores how language and experience shape one another in contexts such as education, chaplaincy, and religious communities, and how such communication fosters resonance, connection, and transformation.
She has an interdisciplinary academic background in religious studies, (practical) theology, and anthropology. She studied Liberal Arts & Sciences at Utrecht University, majoring in cultural anthropology and religious studies, and completed her Research Master in Religious Studies cum laude at the University of Amsterdam with a study on contemporary miracle narratives. She also obtained a secondary-school teaching qualification in religious education at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and taught religion and worldviews in secondary education.
Since 2015 she has been affiliated with Radboud University, where she teaches qualitative research methods and supervises theses in the bachelor’s and master’s programmes in religious studies and theology (with a specialization in chaplaincy). Between 2015 and 2021 she conducted doctoral research on vision and identity formation in primary education (‘Stories about Good Education’). From 2020 to 2025 she also worked as a qualitative researcher at Kaski, the research and expertise centre for religion and society.

• Center for Religion and Contemporary Society (CRCS)

• Chair of Empirical and practical religious studies