We're delighted to announce that three members of the Faculty of Theology and Religion have been granted the full Professorial title at the University of Oxford. This was part of the recent round of Recognition of Distinction Awards, where the title of professor is awarded to those who have made contributions to leadership, teaching and research within the University and within their affiliated department and/or colleges.
Professor Andrew Atherstone has been awarded the title of Professor of Modern Anglicanism. Andrew is Tutorial Fellow and Latimer Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and has published widely on the history of Anglicanism and Evangelicalism from the 18th century to the present day, often examining the intersection of these two global movements. His recent books include Repackaging Christianity: Alpha and the Building of a Global Brand (Hodder and Stoughton, 2022), and, as co-editor, The Oxford Handbook of Christian Fundamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2023), Transatlantic Charismatic Renewal, c.1950-2000 (Brill, 2021), and Making Evangelical History: Faith, Scholarship and the Evangelical Past (Routledge, 2019). He is currently working on a monograph on post-1960s Anglican Evangelical identities for Oxford University Press, and a critical edition of the letters of Charles Simeon, a prominent Hanoverian preacher, for the Church of England Record Society. Andrew is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and co-editor of Routledge Studies in Evangelicalism.
Professor William Wood has been awarded the title of Professor of Philosophical Theology. He is also the Clifford Potter Fellow and Tutor in Theology at Oriel College. He has published two books with Oxford University Press: Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion (2021), and Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall (2013). His broader research interests include questions about the place of theology in the modern research university, philosophical and theological accounts of sin and self-deception in the Augustinian tradition, and what it means to say that God is truth, especially with respect to medieval figures like Anselm and Aquinas. He is originally from the United States. Before coming to Oxford, he received a PhD in theology from the University of Chicago and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
Professor Katherine Southwood has been awarded the title of Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Professor Southwood, a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, is renowned for her interdisciplinary research that bridges Biblical texts and the Social Sciences. Her research interests include Job, pain, the body, death, Judges, Ezra-Nehemiah, Ahiqar, Tobit, exile, and gender. Professor Southwood has published five books including a recent monograph Job’s Body and the Dramatized Comedy of “Moralising” (Routledge: Oxford and New York, 2021) and two recent articles: ‘Trauma, brokenness, and pain in the Book of Lamentations: Empathetic attention as a hermeneutic for thinking about rehabilitation of health’ in Jews and Health: History, Tradition, and Practice Ed, Catherine Hezser. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023 Pp. 23-42; and with James W. Southwood (Clinical Psychologist, NHS England) ‘Job as a work of laughtears and learning: Comedy, pain, and audience empathy’ Bible and Critical Theory. 18/2 (2022), 1-16.
