Members

The network director is currently Dr Lois McFarland, and the steering group also includes Professor Alison Jack, Dr Linden Bicket, Professor Penny Fielding, Dr Michael Fuller, and Professor David Jasper.

Alison Jack

Alison Jack studied English Literature and Language and then Divinity at Edinburgh University. She is currently Professor of Bible and Literature at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh and Principal of New College. Her most recent publication is The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature: Five Hundred Years of Literary Homecomings (Oxford: OUP, 2019). She is currently researching the role of the Bible in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop and Norman MacCaig.

Lois McFarland

Dr Lois McFarland is a Lecturer in Religion and Literature in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include biblical themes of creation and apocalypse in speculative fiction, feminist re-vision, affect theory and ecocriticism.

Linden Bicket

Linden Bicket is Lecturer in Literature and Religion in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Her research interests include patterns of faith and scepticism in modern literature, and she is currently researching the work of women Catholic writers, including Elizabeth Jennings, Flannery O'Connor, and Alice Thomas Ellis.

David Jasper

David Jasper is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow, where he was formerly Professor of Literature and Theology. An honorary professorial fellow in the University of Edinburgh, he is also Canon Theologian of St. Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow. He was the founding editor of the Oxford journal of Literature and Theology and for many years the Changjiang Chair Professor in Renmin University of China, Beijing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Michael Fuller

Michael Fuller is a Lecturer in Science and Religion at New College, University of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Canon of St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh. Formerly a research chemist, he has published widely in the field of science and religion, and has also written papers on theology and music, and theology and Russian literature. He is Vice-President for Publications of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology, and a past Chair of the Science and Religion Forum.

Penny Fielding

Penny Fielding is Grierson Professor of English Literature and has published widely on nineteenth-century Scottish Literature.  Her current project on fiction and secrecy includes ideas of the secret in Scottish religious thought.

Erik Tonning

Erik Tonning is Professor of English in NLA University College, Norway, Professor II of English in the University of Bergen, Norway, and an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama (2007), Modernism and Christianity (2014), and a number of articles and edited volumes on literary modernism, including the forthcoming The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and the Frobenius Institute, 1930-1959. He is Senior Editor of two book series from Bloomsbury Academic, ‘Historicizing Modernism and ‘Modernist Archives’. His current work is on inventions of the secular in modernism, focusing on the long-range influence of nominalism and voluntarism.