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  literature and visual culture, in late modernity. Her research centres on the ways in which art and aesthetics can be distinctive and timely modes of theological and philosophical inquiry. She is particularly invested in examinations of the inextricable links between ethics and aesthetics. Key figures in her work include John Henry Newman, Thérèse of Lisieux, Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ, Christina Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites as well as their inheritors (JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Frances Blogg Chesterton, among others).

Prior to joining St Andrews, she was an 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 as well as her Masters in English Literature from Western University (London, ON, Canada).  She holds an Honours BA in Liberal Arts Studies from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and studied at the college's campuses in New Hampshire, USA and Rome, Italy.

Teaching 

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)

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

Research Areas:

Dr. Lamb focuses on intersections between theology, visual arts and literature in late modernity. She recently co-edited a volume for Religion and Literature (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 finishing a book (with McGill-Queen's University Press) on aesthetic and theological responses to  discontent in the Pre-Raphaelite Circle and in the writings of twentieth-century Pre-Raphaelite inheritors--notably, JRR Tolkien and Frances Blogg Chesterton. Her next book project will consider how Mariology informed John Henry Newman's ethical aesthetics.

She has published numerous 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, Nova et Vetera, Church Life Journal, Religion and Literature, Magnificat, Convivium, and elsewhere.

Dr. Lamb frequently writes for public-facing journals and magazines and  is often invited to speak on topics relating to her research, the public humanities, and theology's influence on culture.

PhD supervision

  • Lydia Gerges
  • Bethany Gilbert
  • Simeon Theojaya
  • Melody Bellefeuille-Frost

Selected publications

  • Roman Catholicism

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

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

  • Suspended in Time: Hopes and Discontents in the Pre-Raphaelite Circle

     Lamb, R. A., 2025, (In preparation) Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

    Research output: Book/Report › Book

  • 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

  • Foreward: John Henry Newman's Discourses on Mary

     Lamb, R. A., 2024, (Accepted/In press) CTS Press. CTS Press

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

  • John Henry Newman's "historical sense"

     Lamb, R. A., Feb 2024, (Accepted/In press) The nineteenth-century present: literary responses to historicity. Manchester: Manchester University Press

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

  • Reading the Times: John Henry Newman

     Lamb, R. A. & Hurley, M. D., 2023, (Accepted/In press) In: Religion and Literature.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Special issue › peer-review

  • Open access

    John Henry Newman's Art of the End

     Lamb, R. A., 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

  • Roman Catholicism

     Lamb, R. A. & Dubois, M. (ed.), 2023, (Accepted/In press) Gerard Manley Hopkins in context. Dubois, M. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (Literature in context (Cambridge University Press)).

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

  • 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

 

See more publications