Dr Rebekah Lamb

Dr Rebekah Lamb

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 specialises in theology and the arts, particularly religion and literature and visual culture, in late modernity with emphasis on the Victorian period. Her research centres on the ways in which art and aesthetics can be distinctive modes of theology in their own right. Key figures in her work include John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, and the Pre-Raphaelites as well as their inheritors (Waugh, Tolkien, and CS Lewis).

Prior to joining St. Andrews she was an inaugural 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 as well as her Masters in English Literature from Western University (London, ON, Canada). During her doctoral studies she was a Kuyper Emerging Scholar and an Ontario Graduate Scholar. She holds an Honours BA in Liberal Arts Studies, with special emphasis on Literature and the Humanities, from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and studied at the College's campuses in New Hampshire, USA and Rome, Italy.

Teaching 

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

DI4936: Theology and Literature

DI5451: Christian Doctrine and the Arts

DI5925: Theology and the Arts (Distance Learning)

DI5453: Practical Criticism

Junior Honours Research Seminar (JHRS)

DI5080: Guided Study (Joseph Pieper)

Research Areas:

Dr. Lamb focuses on intersections between theology, visual arts and literature in late modernity. She recently co-edited a volume (2023) on John Henry Newman with Michael D. Hurley (Cambridge) which offers the most sustained, interdisciplinary account of Newman's theological aesthetics, to date. She is currently writing a book (McGill-Queen's University Press) on the theological nature of discontent in Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, and in the writings of twentieth-century Pre-Raphaelite inheritors--notably, JRR Tolkien and Marshal McLuhan.

Dr Lamb's second book project is a comprehensive appraisal of the influence of Mariology on John Henry Newman's aesthetics. She has published articles, encyclopedia entries, book chapters, and review essays in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, New Blackfriars, Religions, Theology in Scotland, Church Life Journal, Religion and Literature, Magnificat, Convivium, and elsewhere.

Dr. Lamb frequently writes for public-facing journals and magazines and has featured in public programmes for BBC One & BBC Scotland, the Christian Heritage Centre (Stonyhurst), the Thomistic Institute (Oxford and Angelicum chapters), and the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). She is often invited to speak on topics relating to her research, the public humanities, and broader, theological and cultural themes. She delivered the 2023 inaugural Holy Ground Lecture (Edinburgh University) on John Henry Newman's aesthetics, the 2020 Cardinal Winning Lecture (Glasgow University) on St. Thérèse of Lisieux (published, here) and, most recently, a keynote for The Hopkins Society in 2023 at St. Bueno's in Wales. She will give the 2027 Pluscarden Pentecost Lectures.

In 2018 Dr Lamb co-taught the University of Toronto’s first Gilson Seminar in Faith and Ideas in Rome, Italy with Randy Boyagoda. She often teaches on the Centre for Faith and Culture's summer programme in Oxford. In 2020 she founded the annual St. Margaret of Scotland Lecture Series, in collaboration with Canmore Chaplaincy for University Catholics, the Principal's Office, and the School of Divinity, at the University of St. Andrews.

PhD supervision

  • Karen McClain Kiefer
  • Simeon Theojaya
  • Bethany Gilbert
  • Melody Bellefeuille-Frost

Selected publications

 

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