Post-Doc, History
Fellow
Professor Ann Blair, Harvard University
About
I work in the field of early modern and modern European Intellectual History, the History of Christian Theology, and Philosophy of Religion. My long-term teaching and research interests include the history of the Reformation and modern European intellectual history.
At present, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at Harvard University (2009-2010), working under the sponsorship of Professor Ann Blair.
Recently I have had an article entitled “The Cat-Eyed Theologians: Franz Overbeck and Karl Barth” accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal, The Journal for the History of Modern Theology / Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte (forthcoming, 2009).
I received my D.Phil. from the University of Oxford on Sept. 30, 2009. My doctoral research was conducted under the direction of Professor George Pattison who is the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and founder of the Oxford Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought. I titled my thesis “Karl Barth between Orthodoxy & Pietism: A Post-Enlightenment Recovery of Classical Protestantism,” and an early version of a chapter was published in Engaging Karl Barth (Intervarsity Press, 2008; republished with T&T Clark, 2009).
Having fulfilled my doctoral residency in Oxford from 2004 to 2007, I was an enrolled Graduate in Residence at Harvard Divinity School working under the supervision of Professor Ronald F. Thiemann, the Bussey Professor of Theology.
My dissertation evaluates Karl Barth as an intellectual historian of classical Protestantism and a constructive Christian thinker in the context of the Weimar Republic. I explore his interpretation and appropriation of the sixteenth-century Reformation (especially John Calvin) and key Protestant scholastic texts of systematic or dogmatic theology, all as part of his project to construct a viable alternative to certain varieties of post-Kantian Christianity. I argue that this resourcement was mediated by the same neo-Protestant tradition of nineteenth-century historicism that Barth was seeking to overcome, a point which is important for understanding his somewhat idiosyncratic reading of the pre-critical tradition. Clarifying the nature of his relationship to the religious subjectivity of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the modern age generally, I show that Barth was also an heir of what could be called a German-Romantic tradition of intellectual dissent, thus relating him to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Franz Overbeck, and Dostoevsky, figures who were dissatisfied with the reigning academic and bourgeois approach to religion, culture, and intellectual life in the modern world. The interdisciplinary nature of this project requires that I reposition Barth as a mediator between orthodoxy and pietism, the Reformation and Protestant liberalism, with the help of early modern scholarship and contemporary historical theology.
Contact Information
68 Chestnut St. Apt. 2
Boston, MA 02108
USA
