About

I am Senior Lecturer in Philosophical Theology at the University of Winchester. My research focuses on the intersections of political theology and continental philosophy of religion. My book, A Theology of Failure: Žižek against Christian Innocence (Fordham University Press, 2019) brought the recent ‘materialist turn’ in continental philosophy to bear on existing debates about the relationship between Christian mystical theology and contemporary philosophies of difference, otherness and negativity. I argue that Žižek’s materialist thought offers resources for re-conceptualising Christian identity without the idealism which so often characterises Christian theology and tends to cover over both the dependence of Christianity theology on resources drawn from non-Christian traditions and the ways in which Christianity’s failures are not simply incidental but deeply entangled with the basic structures of Christian thinking.

My second book, Theology for the End of the World (SCM Press, July 2023) suggests that in responding to the deeply entwined systems of capitalism, racism and patriarchy we should stop trying to unearth a ‘good version’ of Christianity which stands opposed to these forms of violence and seek instead to reckon with the role that Christianity has played in making the world we now inhabit. How has Christianity shaped the histories of marriage and the family? How did Christianity invent race and give birth to capitalism? Grappling with the ambivalent inheritance of Christianity, a tradition passed down by enslaved people and enslavers; by violent husbands, resourceful wives and courageous sex workers; by rich people and the dispossessed, the book suggests Christians should give up on trying to redeem the world – a social order founded on violence and exploitation – and seek instead to end it.

I am currently working on a number of shorter projects on slavery imagery in Mary Wollstonecraft, demonology in Hobbes, and angels in film. My next major research monograph, currently titled Angelic Machines: gender, technology and the angel-cyborg, will argue that angels and cyborgs occupy a similar role in ancient and contemporary speculation about gender, technology and social organisation, and will track shifts in the representation of these figures across the history of Christianity. Tracking the transformation of the twinned figure of the angel-cyborg across key moments in the history of Western thought makes visible both the historical entanglement of race, gender, technology and ‘the human’ and also the possible futures of the human as understood through the angel and the cyborg.