Lori Gail Beaman (born 1963) is a Canadian academic. She is a professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies of the University of Ottawa, and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Religious Diversity and Social Change. She has published work on religious diversity, religious freedom, and the intersections of religion and law. She was made a fellow of the Academy of the Arts and Humanities of the Royal Society of Canada in 2015, received an Insight Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 2017 and received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in 2018.
Beaman earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy (1985), Bachelor of Laws degree (1987), Master of Arts degree in sociology (1992), and Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociology (1996) at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. She was admitted to the Law Society of New Brunswick in 1988 and practiced law for five years before her postgraduate studies.
Beaman has held faculty positions at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and The University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta. She is the Canada Research Chair in Religious Diversity and Social Change and full professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. She teaches Religion and Law, Theory and Method, and Religion in Contemporary Canada.
From 2009 to 2016 Beaman headed the Religion and Diversity Project, a collaborative research project involving almost forty researchers in five countries, financed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Ottawa. She currently directs the Nonreligion in a Complex Future (NCF) project, which aims to identify the social impact of the increase of nonreligion. The project is international and multidisciplinary, with twenty one researchers in ten countries.
Beaman has written extensively on religious diversity and the intersections of religion and law. She has also written about polygamy and how law frames certain types of family structures. Her commentaries on government responses to religion in the public sphere (such as the proposed Charter of Quebec Values) http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2014/02/20/the-charter-of-quebec-values/#Beaman and the complexities of religious freedom have appeared on the academic blog The Immanent Frame http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/04/27/beyond-establishment/ and in the Tony Blair Faith Foundation's Global Perspectives Series, where she emphasized the need for positive narratives and more nuanced understandings of intra-religious diversity. http://tonyblairfaithfoundation.org/foundation/news/negative-positive-narratives-values-and-strategies-negotiating-difference
In 2015, the Royal Society of Canada acknowledged Beaman's contributions to the study of religious diversity in Canada and her research on deep equality.