My academic work is fairly interdisciplinary, blending philosophy and theology with interests in political, social, and economic theory, and literature and the arts. I completed my PhD in philosophy of religion at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge in 2015. My doctoral research was funded by the AHRC and was on the radical Catholic social theorist and philosopher of history Ivan Illich (an accessible introduction to some of these ideas is available here). A postdoctoral project has been on some ethical, religious, and political issues in law and biotechnology, and concluded with a co-edited volume from Cambridge University Press in 2019. My most recent research is on humour, exploring what life in its comic aspect has to do with questions of power, knowledge, and religious faith. I sometimes write shorter essays, and also somewhat experimentally in other forms, such as short fictions and poems, which occasionally appear in various places.
I have been a Fellow at Magdalene in some capacity or other since 2018, and currently have a number of responsibilities, including as an undergraduate Tutor, Admissions Tutor, and Director of Studies for the Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion Tripos. I have been involved in outreach and widening participation activities at Cambridge since being a graduate student. I worked in this area in a more concentrated way with the School of Arts and Humanities from 2018-2020 and was an Outreach Fellow in the Arts at Magdalene prior to being an Admissions Tutor.
I try to be open to any topic that allows me to bring philosophical and theological reasoning to bear in interesting ways on issues of contemporary social, political, economic, and/or existential significance. Unfortunately (or fortunately), this means that my research has tended to be somewhat unsystematic and ad hoc!
PhD, MA, BTh
Academic
Humour, Transcendence, and Selfhood: An Essay on Lightness and Truth. Modern Theology, 2024: early view.
On Surprise and the Indirectness of the Theological in the Work of Ivan Illich. Política Común 15 (2022): forthcoming.
Play and Interruption as a Mode of Human Action in Arendt, Dostoevsky, and Kharms. Janus Head 19 (2021): 61-76.
Patents on Life: Religious, Moral, and Social Justice Aspects of Biotechnology and Intellectual Property (co-edited with Thomas C. Berg and Roman Cholij). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Morality, Religion, and Patents (with Kathleen Liddell). In Patents on Life: Religious, Moral, and Social Justice Aspects of Biotechnology and Intellectual Property. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Irony as a Way of Life?. Reviews in Religion and Theology, 24 (2017): 228-235.
Modernity and the Economics of Gift and Charity: On Ivan Illich’s Critique of Abstract Philanthropy. Telos 174 (2016): 149-170.
Charité, amour et don dans l'oeuvre d'Ivan Illich. In Ivan Illich, l'alchimiste des possibles, edited by Martin Fortier and Thierry Paquot, 165-211. Paris: Lemieux Editeur, 2016.
Usury in the Inferno: Auditing Dante’s Debt to the Scholastics. Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 42 (2011): 89-114.
General audience
Travel Notes: On Writing, Surprise and the Self Through Time, Transpositions, 30 November 2024.
What I learned from Ivan Illich about ‘cultivating the art of living’, ABC Religion and Ethics, 25 July 2024.
Cambridge colleges’ admissions free-for-all risks damaging access goals, Times Higher Education, 5 June 2024 (print issue 2,562, p. 27).
Cambridge and fair access: medieval answers to a contemporary problem, Council for the Defence of British Universities, 5 June 2024.
Plucking Grain on the Sabbath: Mark 2:23-28; Matt 12:1-8; Luke 6:1-5. The Visual Commentary on Scripture. King's College London: 2021.
Rotten Riches: James 4:13-5:6, with Ruth Jackson. The Visual Commentary on Scripture. King's College London: 2019.
Martin Buber’s I and Thou (Macat Guides). London: Routledge, 2018.
Beyond the Impasse: Review of Johannes Hoff, The Analogical Turn. The Living Church, 1 June 2017.
Of Elephants and Cynics: Rehabilitating Truth in a Post-Truth Age. ABC Religion & Ethics, 22 May 2017.
Plato’s Symposium (Macat Guides) (with Richard Ellis). London: Routledge, 2017
The Joyful Uselessness of Ivan Illich: Reply to Scialabba. forthetimebeing: A Blog of the Luce Project on Religion and Its Publics, 31 March 2017.
Levity and Theology: On Playing the Fool in Academia and Life. ABC Religion & Ethics, 7 April 2016, and Noesis: Theology, Philosophy, Poetics 3 (2016): 68-78.
Patenting Life: Rethinking Social Justice, the Politics of Knowledge and Theologies of Property. ABC Religion & Ethics, 11 Feb. 2016.
Producing Happiness: Huxley and Dostoevsky on Love and Politics. Noesis: Theology, Philosophy, Poetics 2 (2015): 47-55.
In Kierkegaard's Reflektion?: Arcade Fire in a 'Reflective Age'. PopMatters, 8 Sept. 2014.
Cultural Value and the Contradictions of Modern Conservatism. The Cultural Value Initiative, 2 June 2013.
‘Disvalue’? An Illichian Case for a Cultural Value Discourse. The Cultural Value Initiative, 9 Nov. 2012.