Literature, Theology and the Arts at Glasgow

Professor Heather Walton‌

• (ed.) with Elizabeth Anderson and Andrew Radford (eds.) Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing: A Piercing Darkness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
•  'And a sword will pierce your soul also’: reflections on the holy mother and the holy child. Holiness: The Journal of Wesley House Cambridge, 2.1 (2016), pp. 93-103.
• Not Eden: Spiritual Life Writing for this World (SCM, 2015)
• Writing Methods in Theological Reflection (SCM Press, 2014)
• 'Seeking Wisdom in Practical Theology: Phronesis, Poetics and Everyday Life', vol. 7: 1 (2014)
• 'Feminist Theology in the Academy' in A Maddrell and Lena Gemzoe (eds) Contemporary Encounters in Religion and Gender (Palgrave, 2014)
• 'Desiring Things: Practical Theology and the New Materialisms' in B. Miller-McLemore, R. Ganzevoort and R. Brouwer (eds) City of Desires: A Place for God (Lit Verlag, 2013)
• 'Poetics' in Bonnie Miller McLemore (ed) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology. (Wiley- Blackwell, 2012) pp.183-192
• 'The Course Outline: Teaching Theology Through Creative Writing', Journal of Adult Theological Education, vol. 9:2 (2012)

Professor David Jasper‌

• Literature and Theology as a Grammar of Assent (Ashgate, 2016)
• 'Retrieving a Theological Sense of Being Human', Literature and Theology vol. 29, no. 2 (2015)
• with R Fotiade, 'Jean-Luc Marion: a reflection'. In: Givenness and Revelation (OUP Oxford, 2016)
• 'The Eucharistic body'. In: Fotiade, R., Jasper, D. and Salazar-Ferrer, O. (eds.) Embodiment: Phenomenological, Religious and Deconstructive Views on Living and Dying. (Ashgate, 2014)
• The Sacred Community (Baylor University Press, 2012)

Professor George Pattison

• Eternal God/Saving Time (OUP, 2015)
• Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life (OUP, 2013)
• Heidegger on Death (Ashgate 2013)
• (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard (2013)
• Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century (CUP, 2012)‌

Dr Anna Fisk‌

• 'Stood Weeping Outside the Tomb: Dis(re)membering Mary Magdalene'.In: Sherwood, Y. (ed.) Bible, Feminism and Gender:Remapping the Field (OUP University Press, 2017)
• 'Appropriating, Romanticising and Reimagining: Pagan Engagement with Indigenous Animism'.In: Rountree, K. (ed.)Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism andModern Paganism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
• 'Encounters in Feminist Revisioning' in Biblical Interpretation 23. 1 (2015)
• Sex, Sin, and Our Selves (Wipf and Stock, 2014) 
• 'Sisterhood in the Wilderness: Biblical Paradigms and Feminist Identity Politics in Readings of Hagar and Sarah', in Looking Through a Glass Bible, edited by AKM Adam and Samuel Tongue (Brill, 2014)
• 'To Make, and Make again': Feminism, Craft and Spirituality'. Feminist Theology, 20.2 (2012) pp. 160-174.

Dr Mia Spiro

• 'Uncanny survivors and the Nazi beast: Monstrous imagination in See under: Love'. Prooftexts, 35.1 (2016), pp. 25-36.
• Modern Monsters: Golems, Vampires, and the Ghosts of War. Northwestern University Press, forthcoming).
• 'Beasts of burdened memories: exotic figures in Michal Chabon's holocaust fiction' In: Rousselot, E. (ed.) Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 160-177.
• Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction. (Northwestern University Press, 2013)
• with P. Lassner, 'A tale of two cities: Virginia Woolf’s imagined Jewish spaces and London’s East End Jewish culture'. Woolf Studies Annual 19 (2013), pp. 58-82.
• 'Containing the monster: the Golem in Expressionist film and theater'. Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, 9.1 (2013), pp. 11-36.

Deryl Davis, 'The Great Calvinist Poem': Romantic Epic, Lyric Theodicy, and Robert Pollok's The Course of Time.

This thesis explores the purposes and reception history of Robert Pollok's 8500-line bestselling epic poem, The Course of Time (1827). Pollok used the epic form to re-affirm divine providence and re-assert providential history in the context of the Enlightment and the rise of historical biblical criticism. A poet and dissenting Calvinist trained in theology, Pollok presented a verse theodicy for his own day, as Milton had done for Restoration England. The Course of Time became a publishing phenomenon, selling over 80,000 copies in Great Britain and abroad over the course of five decades. Yet The Course of Time was last published in 1898, and twentieth and twenty-first century criticism and literary history have largely forgotten the poem even existed. This thesis asks why that is and what we can learn from Pollok's purposes and the surprising history of "the poem that time forgot."

Clare Radford, Narrative Activism and Theologies of Liberation

‌Narrative activism, the sharing stories of lived experiences of marginalisation to create social change, is a popular and widespread practice for marginalised communities and third sector organisations. My research examines the ways the contemporary performances of narrative activism in the UK contribute to feminist theologies of narration as a liberative praxis. I am also interested in research around creative arts based methodologies, postcolonial theologies, and feminist fantasy and sci-fi literature. 

Kathryn Wills, To what extent is the language of Jean-Luc Nancy’s theological phenomenology helpful in examining the translations of W.B. Yeats’ key poems by Yves Bonnefoy? 

In his 1989 edition of forty-five translations of Yeats’ poems, Bonnefoy offers subtle but important changes to the original texts, supplemented by his detailed introduction. As a contemporary French poet of some distinction, Bonnefoy recreates the poems afresh, rather than just translating them. His new versions of the poems explore some of Bonnefoy’s key poetic and theological preoccupations, in contradistinction to Yeats’ ideas which suggest fragmentation as opposed to unity, a Protestant vision over the Catholic vision of Bonnefoy of a sacramental universe. However, it is clear that for Bonnefoy, Yeats is a kindred soul, a poet who offers hope to a beleaguered humanity in its need; a more conventional view of Yeats has been that he is offering quite the opposite – forms of escape from a disappointing world. My research has been about locating and exploring such apparent paradoxes in the rich relationship of the poets.

Over the years LTA has produced number of collaborative publications, bringing together the diverse work of our students, staff and associates.

Jasper, David and George Newlands, with Darlene Bird (eds.) Believing in the text: essays from the Centre for the Study of Literature, Theology, and the Arts (Bern: Peter Lang Verlag, 2003)	Bird, Darlene and Yvonne Sherwood (eds.) Bodies in Question: Gender, Religion, Text (Ashgate, 2005)	Walton, Heather (ed.) Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces (Ashgate, 2011)