I joined the School in September 2003 (then the Department of Religious Studies), having studied in Canada (BA - English, MTh - Theology) and Glasgow (PhD at the Centre For the Study of Literature, Theology and the Arts), and having worked at the University of Houston in the States, where I was Visiting Associate Professor in Religion and Literature.
“What guides [my] thinking [poetically] is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as ‘thought fragments’, as something ‘rich and strange’…”
Hannah Arendt
I see higher education and pearl diving as similar vocations.
Research
My area of research looks at the intersection of religion with literature (and the arts), with philosophy, and with critical theory. A particular emphasis is on hermeneutics and the questions of textuality and interpretation. I am interested in how religion necessarily crosses over into other realms of thinking and experience, and how this might be made manifest in the various textual expressions handed down by tradition or found within contemporary culture. My work therefore has been consciously interdisciplinary (POETICS OF CRITIQUE, 2003; OXFORD HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY, 2007, e.g.), as I pursue ways to envision and enact religion beyond its institutional norms, beyond even the category of religion itself. Presently, I am writing on the concept of Nothing in our Western religious, intellectual and artistic traditions, and, in a related way, researching the ongoing legacy of Hegel in regards to negation.
I am also the Executive General Editor of LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RELIGION, THEORY AND CULTURE (http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org). Here I engage with international scholars working in the fields of religion, literature, theory and culture. The Journal helps to sponsor biannual conferences around Europe and the UK, and I organised the 2006 conference here in Stirling on the theme Sacred Space (see http://www.gla.ac.uk/esrla/ConferenceWrap.html).
I welcome postgraduate research proposals in the following areas: religion/theology and literature, religion/theology and the arts, religion/theology and continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, et al.), hermeneutics (Gadamer, Ricoeur, et al.), critical theory, postsecularity, negation, and other related areas.
•Oxford Handbook of English Literature & Theology, co-editors David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• ‘Seeing Through a Glass Face to Face: Rembrandt and the Self Portrait’, in Believing in the Text, eds. David Jasper and George Newlands (Peter Lang, 2004)
• Poetics of Critique: The Interdisciplinarity of Textuality (Ashgate Publishing, August 2003)
• "In the Modern Wake: Reading As Process In The Late 20th Century", in God, Literature and Process Thought, ed. Darren Middleton (Ashgate Publishing, 2001)
• Self/Same/Other: Re-visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology, co-editor Heather Walton, Playing with the Text, 5, series ed. George Aichele (Sheffield Academic Press, 2000)
• The Bible and Literature: A Reader, with David Jasper and Stephen Prickett (Blackwell, 1999)
Literature and Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory and Culture (OxfordUniversity Press)
