People
Find out about the people that make up our Religions and Theology department.
We have one of the UK's highest international reputations for research.
You'll be taught by scholars of international standing who are linguists, anthropologists, theologians of several religions, philosophers, historians, and critical theorists.
Head of department
Academic staff
Dr Andrew Boakye
Lecturer in Religions and Theology
Research interests: Pauline theology, Pauline Christology, Abraham, the use of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament, revivification in Jewish texts, identity construction in ancient Christianity.
Dr Charlotte Bray
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Lincoln Theological Institute
Research interests: Catholic social thought and practice; liberation theologies; political theology; the theological beliefs which underlie Christian ethical thinking and practice; Judith Butler and Queer Theory; Christian theologies of sin and grace, particularly concerning the social and structural dimensions of sin.
Dr Michael Hoelzl
Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy and Religion
Research interests: social ethics, political theology, philosophy of law with an emphasis on Schmittian studies, theories of secularisation, and the new visibility of religion.
Dr Kamran Karimullah
Lecturer in Islamic Thought
Research interests: medieval Arabo-Islamic philosophy, ancient and medieval medicine, Graeco-Arabic studies, corpus linguistics, translation studies.
Dr Todd Klutz
Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies and Early Christian Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Biblical Studies
Research interests: Biblical literature and ethics, 'magic' and shamanism in the biblical world, Luke-Acts, 'Gnosticism' in antiquity and its return in modernity, the Nag Hammadi library, Hellenistic Greek, method and theory in the study of religion.
Professor David R Law
Professor of Christian Thought and Philosophical Theology
Research interests: existentialism, hermeneutics, theories of biblical inspiration, kenotic theology, Anglican theology, 19th and 20th century German theology, theology and film, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers.
Dr Finlay Malcolm
Research Associate in Religion, Theology and Climate Change
Research interests: Religion and climate change; philosophy of trust and faith; religion in the political sphere; political philosophy, especially democracy and varieties of government; empirical methods - qualitative and quantitative research; religion and public policy.
Dr Scott Midson
Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Coordinator of Liberal Arts Programme
Research interests: posthumanism, theological anthropology, philosophy and theology of artificial intelligence, science and technology studies, secularisation and the sociology of religion, postmodernism, Christian ethics, new media, ecotheology.
Dr Holly Morse
Senior Lecturer in Bible, Gender and Culture
Research interests: the Hebrew Bible, gender criticism, feminist criticism, visual arts, female biblical interpretation, reception theory, critical theory, hermeneutics.
Professor Peter Oakes
Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis and Co-Director of the Centre for Biblical Studies
Research interests: New Testament in the Graeco-Roman world, Paul's letters and theology, diversity among NT audiences, archaeology, economics.
Dr Samuel O’Connor Perks
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Research interests: 20th century French theology, political theology, philosophy of history, secularisation, conversion, heresy, intellectual history, social and economic history, art and architectural history, critical theory, aesthetics.
Dr Eve Parker
Lecturer in Modern Christian Theology
Research interests: Dalit Theology, World Christianity, Indecent Theology, Christianity in India, Liberation Theologies, abuse in religious communities, multiple religious belonging, transformative pedagogy.
Dr Sarah Parkhouse
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Research interests: early Christianity, Coptic texts and contexts, ancient religions in comparative perspective, lived religion, place, space and landscape.
Dr Wren Radford
Lecturer in Liberal Arts
Research interests: practical theology; literature and theology; feminist, disability, queer theologies; qualitative and creative methodologies; inequality and social change.
Professor Alexander Samely
Professor of Jewish Thought and Co-Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies
Research interests: literary structures in ancient Jewish literature, including biblical and Talmudic literature; ancient Jewish Bible interpretation, including Midrash, Targum, Pesher and rewritten scripture; the legal discourse of Talmudic literature; the philosophical thought of Spinoza, Husserl, Rosenzweig, Buber and Levinas; theories of reading Hebrew manuscripts; the phenomenology of reading.
Professor Peter Manley Scott
Samuel Ferguson Professor of Applied Theology and Director, Lincoln Theological Institute
Research interests: Political and liberation theologies, theology of nature/doctrine of creation, theologies and philosophies of technology, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Marxism.
Dr Katja Stuerzenhofecker
Lecturer in Gender Studies in Religion
Research interests: Gender issues in contemporary Christian and Jewish practices and their relation to thought and tradition. Teaching and learning in higher education, with special interest in the study of contemporary religion.
Lecturers from other departments
- Dr Sebastien Bachelet - Lecturer in Social Anthropology
- Professor Erica Baffelli - Professor of Japanese Studies
- Dr Moshe Behar - Pears Senior Lecturer In Israeli and Middle Eastern Studies
- Dr Rupert Cox - Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
- Dr Jean-Marc Dreyfus - Reader in Holocaust Studies
- Prof Penny Harvey - Director of CRESC, Professor of Social Anthropology
- Dr Stef Jansen - Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
- Dr Grigory Kessel - Research Fellow, The John Rylands Research Institute and Library
- Dr Dalia Mostafa - Lecturer in Arabic and Comparative Literature
- Dr Madeleine Reeves - Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
- Prof Zahia Salhi - Professor of Modern Arabic Studies
- Dr Gregory Adam Scott - Lecturer in Chinese Studies
- Dr Olga Ulturgasheva - Lecturer in Social Anthropology
- Dr Soumhya Venkatesan - Senior Lecturer In Social Anthropology
- Dr Tom Woerner-Powell - Lecturer in Modern Islam
Emeritus professors
- Prof Philip Alexander - Emeritus Professor of Post-Biblical Jewish Studies
- Prof George Brooke - Emeritus Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis
- Prof Bernard Jackson - Emeritus Alliance Professor of Modern Jewish Studies
- Prof Alan Williams - Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion
Honorary research fellows
- Dr Kent Brower – New Testament
- Dr Stephen Barton – New Testament
- Prof Youssef Choueiri - Islamic History
- Dr Maria Cioată – Jewish Studies
- Dr Matthew Collins – Hebrew Bible
- Dr Adrian Curtis - Hebrew Bible
- Revd F Gerald Downing – New Testament
- Dr Geordan Hammond - Church History
- Rabbi Dr Michael Hilton - Jewish Studies
- Revd Canon Dr David Holgate – Christian Theology
- Dr Walter Houston - Hebrew Bible
- Dr Helen R Jacobus - Dead Sea Scrolls
- Dr Gergely Juhasz – Church History
- Dr Katharina Keim – Jewish Studies
- Dr Dominika Kurek-Chomycz – New Testament
- Dr Tony Kushner - Jewish History
- Dr David Lamb – New Testament
- Prof Paul Middleton – New Testament
- Prof Mary Mills – Hebrew Bible
- Dr Peter Nockles - Church History
- Dr Ion Popa - Holocaust Studies
- Revd Canon Prof John Rodwell - Christian Theology
- Rabbi Dr Reuven Silverman - Jewish Studies
- Dr Stefania Silvestri - Postdoctoral Research Associate
- Dr Jacqueline Suthren Hirst - South Asian Studies
- Dr Dwight Swanson – Biblical Studies
- Dr Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz - Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe Postdoctoral Fellow for 2020-22
- Rt Revd Dr David Walker - Christian Theology
- Dr John Zavos - South Asian Studies
- Dr Siobhan Jolley - Art and Religion
Professional support staff
- Laura Marsden - Undergraduate Programmes Coordinator
- Hannah Sutton - Undergraduate Programmes Administrator