I
joined the Department of Catholic Studies at DePaul in the fall of 2014. Before
DePaul, I taught as a postdoctoral fellow in Villanova University’s Augustine
and Culture Seminar. I received my PhD in theology from the University of Notre
Dame in 2009. I received an MPhil in divinity from Emmanuel College, University
of Cambridge (UK) in 2003, and I studied philosophy and classics as an
undergraduate at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Research
My research interests follow along two distinct lines. I
wrote my doctoral dissertation on Irenaeus of Lyon, a second-century bishop and
one of the first great theologians of the Christian tradition. I am interested
in how Ireaneus employs methods from the Greco-Roman intellectual context in
which he lived for the service of “orthodox” interpretation of the Scriptures.
My future work in this field will continue this trajectory and pay particular
attention to how Christians of the first four centuries understood love (agape)
as constitutive of their identity and their interpretation of Scripture. That
is, I’m interested in how literary theories and approaches influenced the
reading of Christian Scriptures and thus Christian theology.
My other research interest is in “religious” (especially
Christian) themes in contemporary Anglophone literature. In this field, I am
interested in exploring those authors whose characters and plots evince little
evidence for explicit religious faith, but who can be understood more
fruitfully with explicitly religious ideas in mind. In this way, I am interested
in how Christian theology might inform our understanding of literary texts.
Teaching
The Catholic
Studies Department at DePaul is the perfect place for me to explore my teaching
interests, which range from theology to history to literature. In theology, I
teach a course called “Introduction to Catholicism,” which introduces students
to key Catholic beliefs, practices, texts, and authors. In history, I teach the
first class in our history of Christianity sequence, which covers the life of
Jesus to around the year 1200. And in literature, I teach courses such as
“Literature and the Sacred,” “Catholicism and Literature,” and “Contemporary
Spiritual Memoirs.” As I continue my time at DePaul, I look forward to
expanding my teaching repertoire.