UNIVERSITY of GLASGOW

Theology & Religious Studies
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Centre for the Study of Literature, Theology and the Arts

Introduction
The Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts was created nearly thirty years ago as an innovatory space to accommodate multi-disciplinary work that does not fit into a single subject area. Though the Centre has its base in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, it has close links with other subject areas within the University, particularly English Literature and Art History; and staff from Classics, Politics, Film, Theatre and TV, Music, and the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute contribute to the Centre’s weekly seminar programme. The Centre also enjoys close relationships with the Glasgow School of Art and the Glasgow Museums.

Though our context is primarily Christian (and post-Christian), we also work in the areas of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese Religions. (To be a member of the Centre, no religious membership is required). Our context is both local – we work with local writers, galleries and artists – and international – we have links with scholars in Scandinavia, Poland, Russia, Germany, France, Japan, China, the USA and elsewhere.

The Centre has close links with the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture and was the inspiration for the Oxford University Press journal, Literature and Theology. 

Postgraduate Research
Perhaps the best introduction to the Centre is through a brief glimpse at some of the work of the postgraduates, who in a real sense ‘are’ the Centre. The postgraduates define the particular shape the Centre takes each academic year. Recent and current PhD dissertation topics include:

  • "Inventing the Original": Poets, Readers and Biblical Criticism
  • Memorialisation and Jewish Theology in the 20th and 21st Centuries: Monument, Narrative and Liturgy
  • Ambivalence and the Divine the Feminist Fiction of Michele Roberts and Sara Maitland
  • Embracing the Goddess: Spiritual Autobiographies and Thealogical Shift
  • Writing a Material Mysticism: H.D., Hélène Cixous and Divine Alterity
  • Imaging Texts: Ancient Biblical Texts and Contemporary Aesthetics

The Centre also offers taught postgraduate degrees, the MTh and the MLitt. For information on these, please click on the link to the left.

Publications

The Centre takes its role of training emerging academics in a competitive market very seriously. Beyond and through their work for their PhD/MLitt/MTh degrees, students are encouraged in the area of collaborative and individual publication. For examples of recent articles by postgraduates and collaborative work by staff and postgraduates, see:

Elizabeth Anderson, Kate McLoughlin, Avril Maddrell and Alana Vincent, Memory, Mourning and Landscape (Rodopi: forthcoming).

Elizabeth Anderson, "Dancing Modernism: Ritual, Ecstasy and the Female Body." Literature and Theology 22, no. 3 (2008): 354-367 (special edition with articles from the Centre's conference Sexing the Text).

Mark Godin, "That the Sacrament is Always There: Towards a Eucharistic Ethic." Theology and Sexuality 14, no. 1 (2007): 53-62.

Michael W. DeLashmutt, "Nathaniel William Taylor and Thomas Reid: Scottish Commonsense Philosophy and the Formation of New Haven Theology in Antebellum America." Scottish Journal of Theology 58, no. 1 (2006): 59-82.

Michael W. DeLashmutt, "Syncretism Or Correlation: Teilhard and Tillich's Contrasting Methodological Approaches to Science and Theology." Zygon 40, no. 3 (2005): 739-50.

Darlene Bird and Yvonne Sherwood (eds), Bodies in Question: Gender, Religion, Text (Ashgate:2004) (including articles by members and former members of the Centre).

David Jasper, George Newlands and Darlene Bird, Believing in the Text: Essays from the Study of Literature, Theology and the Arts, University of Glasgow (Peter Lang: 2004).

Brad Johnson, ‘Playing Poker With Pascal: Theology in the American Casino’, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6.1 (December 2004). http://www.jcrt.org/archives/06.1/johnson.pdf

Mark Brummitt and Yvonne Sherwood, The Tenacity of the Word: Using Jeremiah 36 to Attempt to Construct an Appropriate Edifice to the Memory of Robert Carroll’, in Hunter and Davies (eds.), Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll (Continuum: 2002).

Benjamin Morse, ‘The Lamentations Project: Biblical Mourning Through Modern Montage', Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 28:1, pp. 113-127.