Dr Rebekah Lamb-Varela

Director of Teaching

Lecturer in Theology, Imagination and the Arts

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: religion and literature; theological aesthetics; modern Catholic women writers. Her second, growing strand of research in Systematic and Historical Theology focuses on liturgical theology, the development of Christian doctrine, and the 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) and CTS 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

David Bernabe Romero
Bethany Gilbert
Elizabeth Goings
Lydia Kelliney
Jose Rama Dominguez
Melody Schwarting

Selected publications

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
Christina Rossetti's Christology
Lamb, R. A., 12 Nov 2024, Holman Hunt and The Light of the World in Oxford. Bockmuehl, M. (ed.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 52-70 19 p. (Routledge studies in theology, imagination and the arts).
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Open access
John Henry Newman's Art of the End
Lamb, R. A., 1 Aug 2024, In: Nova et Vetera. 22, 3, p. 893 922 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Gerard Manley Hopkins and the art of looking
Lamb, R. A., Feb 2023, Magnificat.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication › Featured article
Introduction: John Henry Newman: reading the times
Hurley, M. D. & Lamb, R. A., 2 Oct 2023, In: Religion and Literature. 55, 1, p. 1-5 5 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
The Marian turn in Newman’s idea of history
Lamb, R., 2 Oct 2023, In: Religion and Literature. 55, 1, p. 49-70 22 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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