After degrees in Wales and Nottingham, I undertook an AHRC-funded PhD in Philosophy of Religion at Peterhouse, Cambridge from 2010-2015. This was followed by postdoctoral work at the Von Hügel Institute (also Cambridge) and as a Murphy Research Fellow with the University of St Thomas, Minnesota. My past research has criss-crossed the disciplines of theology, philosophy, literature, political and social theory, and economics. My doctoral thesis was on the work of the late Catholic radical Ivan Illich, re-examining his thinking around the fate of social relations under conditions of economic modernity. A major postdoctoral project has been on the ethical issues surrounding the patenting of life forms, bringing moral, religious, and political considerations into conversation with developments in law and biotechnology, and will conclude with the publication of a co-edited volume with Cambridge University Press in 2019. My latest research is on laughter, exploring what life in its comic aspect has to do with questions of power, knowledge, and religious faith.
Recently I’ve become more heavily engaged with outreach and widening participation at Cambridge, both for the University and now at Magdalene, with a particular focus on the arts and humanities. I’m convinced that the forms of reasoning and reflection that these disciplines foster and espouse remain vitally important for life and society today, and try to get this message across to prospective applicants (and their parents) as often as possible!
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, this means that my research has tended to be somewhat unsystematic and ad hoc.
PhD (2015), Peterhouse, University of Cambridge
MA (2010), University of Nottingham
BTh (2008), University of Wales
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, forthcoming 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.
A Macat Guide to Martin Buber’s I and Thou. London: Routledge, 2018.
“Irony as a Way of Life?”. Reviews in Religion and Theology, 24 (2017): 228-235.
A Macat Guide to Plato’s Symposium (with Richard Ellis). London: Routledge, 2017.
“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.