Dr Rebekah Lamb-Varela

Director of Teaching

Lecturer in Theology, Imagination and the Arts

Researcher profile

Phone

+44 (0)1334 46 2840

Email

rl89@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Research areas

Dr. Rebekah Lamb-Varela is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Theology and the Arts in the School of Divinity. She is also the School's Director of Teaching, and a staff member of the Institute of Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA).

Dr Lamb-Varela specialises in Theology and the Arts: specifically, religion and literature; theological aesthetics; modern literary and cultural studies. Her second, growing strand of research in Systematic and Historical Theology focuses on liturgical theology, Christian doctrine (especially related to Mariology and sacramental theology), and the literary history of Roman Catholicism in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain.

Dr Lamb-Varela is an elected Arts and Humanities representative on university senate, an associate staff member of the Scottish Catholic Studies Arts Lab (SCAL) at the University of Glasgow, and serves on the editorial boards of the Newman Studies Journal (National Institute of Newman Studies),  CTS Press, and the Catholic Women Writers Series with Catholic University of America Press.

Prior to joining St Andrews, Dr Lamb-Varela was the inagural Étienne Gilson Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (St Michael's College) and received her PhD in Victorian and Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature, with an emphasis on religion and literature as well as Victorian cultural studies. She also received her Masters in English Literature from Western University (London, ON, Canada).  She holds an Honours BA in Liberal Arts  from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and studied at the college's campuses in New Hampshire, USA and Rome, Italy.

Teaching 

DI5451: Christian Doctrine and the Arts

DI5925: Theology and the Arts (Distance Learning)

DI5453: Practical Criticism

DI5080: Guided Study (Joseph Pieper)

DI4936: Theology and Literature

DI2011: Religion Today

DI2009: Saints & Cyborgs: The Imagination in Theology and Science. Co-taught with Dr. Joanna Leidenhag and Dr. Gavin Hopps

Research Areas:

Dr. Lamb-Varela specialises in Theology and the Arts and Systematic and Historical Theology, within the Catholic tradition and with an emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

She is currently the Co-Principal Investigator on a two-year project, entitled 'Catholic Women Writers in Scotland and Beyond,' funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) Collaboration Grant. The primary output of her project will be the first Handbook of Catholic Women Writers, under contract with Oxford University Press, and co-edited with four other academics from Cambridge (Dr Bonnie Lander-Johnson); Edinburgh (Dr Linden Bicket); The Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas (Dr Julia Meszaros); and Warwick (Professor Emma Mason).

With Michael D. Hurley (Cambridge), Dr Lamb-Varela recently co-edited a special issue on John Henry Newman (Religion and Literature, 2023). Her current book project, Writing Charity: Consolations in Modernity (under contract with McGill-Queen's University Press), offers a constructive account of the theology of consolation as found in the writings of John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti, Thérèse of Lisieux, and JRR Tolkien. In so doing, the project proposes that Christian accounts of charity engage with, and re-evaluate, the hermeneutics of disenchantment and skepticism predominant in modern literary studies.

Dr Lamb-Varela has published numerous articles, encyclopedia entries, handbook and companion entries, book chapters and review essays in Religion and Literature, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, New Blackfriars, Theology in Scotland, Nova et Vetera, Church Life Journal, Magnificat, Convivium, and elsewhere.

She frequently writes for public-facing journals and outlets, such as  BBC Scotland and chapters of the Thomistic Institute, and is often invited to speak at academic conferences, workshops, chaplaincies, and parishes on topics relating to her research, the public humanities, and Catholic theology. 

PhD supervision

• Bethany Gilbert
• Lydia Kelliney
• Melody Schwarting

Selected publications

• John Henry Newman's Idea of the Holy

  Lamb-Varela, R., 2028, (In preparation) John Henry Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons: A Critical Guide. Levering, M. & de Gaal, E. (eds.). Emmaus Academic

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• J.R.R. Tolkien's Detached Aesthetics

  Lamb-Varela, R., 2028, (In preparation) J.R.R. Tolkien: Christian Perspectives, World Literature. Schwartz, A. (ed.). Catholic University of America Press, (Christian Perspectives, World Literature).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• ‘They must be content to serve their generation’: John Henry Newman on Literature as Edification

  Lamb-Varela, R., 2028, (In preparation) In: Forum for Modern Languages Studies.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• Writing Charity: Consolations in Modern Literature

  Lamb, R. A., 2027, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

  Research output: Book/Report › Book

• Open access

  "‘Amare nesciri’: John Henry Newman on the hidden self

  Lamb-Varela, R., 13 Sept 2026, (Accepted/In press) In: New Blackfriars.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• Introduction

  Lamb, R. A., 21 Nov 2025, Two discourses on our Lady. Lamb Varela, R. (ed.). London: CTS Press

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Foreword/postscript

• John Henry Newman's "historical sense"

  Lamb, R. A., Jul 2025, The nineteenth-century present: literature, print culture and historicity. Claes, K. & Ludlow, E. (eds.). Manchester: Manchester University Press, (Interventions: rethinking the nineteenth century (Series)).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Roman Catholicism

  Lamb, R. A., 2025, The Cambridge companion to religion in Victorian literary culture. Knight , M. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• The Oxford handbook of modern Catholic women writers

  Lamb, R. (Editor), Bicket, L. (Editor), Meszaros, J. (Editor), Lander Johnson, B. (Editor) & Mason, E. (Editor), 2029, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Research output: Book/Report › Book

• Victorian Roman Catholicism

  Lamb, R. A., 16 Jan 2025, Gerard Manley Hopkins in context. Dubois, M. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 110-117 8 p. (Literature in context (Cambridge University Press)).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

 

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