Supervisor/s:
Prof. Carol Harrison
College:
St Stephen's House
Research Overview:
My research is focused on Augustine of Hippo’s thoughts on affectivity. I am intrigued by the conflicting accounts in the scholarship concerning Augustine’s understanding and evaluation of the affections; I believe that their incompatibility boils down to divergent strategies of interpretation. My work is guided by the consideration that, for Augustine, the bulk of whose corpus having been completed in the setting of Christian ministry, it was theology which governed his appropriation of the various philosophical traditions; this condition, in turn, requires from us an adequate grasp of the place of the Christian Scripture and Trinitarian theology in Augustine’s thinking, in order to be able to comprehend his thoughts on affectivity.
Research Area/s:
Augustine of Hippo, patristic theology, affectivity
About:
I worked as a software engineer after having completed my combined BE and BSc program at the University of New South Wales (Sydney). After that, I obtained my MDiv, turned to Christian ministry and completed my ThM—both at the China Graduate School of Theology (Hong Kong). Interested in exploring the way in which a theologian may adopt patristic thoughts to address contemporary problems, I wrote a dissertation, in the latter program, to investigate the ordering of love as a governing principle in the early stages of the development of the theological ethics of Oliver O’Donovan.
Academic Interests:
Trinitarian theology, systematic and historical theology, Christian ethics, theological method, aesthetics, hermeneutics, mind and body, language and embodiment
Academic Related Activities:
Presentations:
‘The Sin of Ratio: A Study of Characterisation in Augustine’s Soliloquia’ at the Conference of the North American Patristic Society (2021).
‘Body-Soul Hierarchy in Augustine’s De ordine and De libero arbitrio’ at the Oxford-Bonn Joint Seminar (2019).
