I am on research leave for the academic year 2024-2025.

I am Senior Lecturer in Bible, Gender and Culture and author of Encountering Eve's Afterlives: A New Reception Critical Approach to Genesis 2-4. In this book, I seek to destabilize the persistently pessimistic framing of Eve as a highly negative symbol of femininity within Western culture by engaging with marginal, and even heretical, interpretations that focus on more positive aspects of her character. In doing so, I explore how and why the image of Eve as a dangerous temptress has gained considerably more cultural currency than the equally viable pictures of her as a subversive wise woman or as a mourning mother. This book began its life as my PhD thesis at the University of Oxford, with the title 'And God Created Woman...', supervised by Prof Susan Gillingham.

I am co-founder of the Bible, Gender and Church Research Centre, with Dr Kirsi Cobb of Cliff College. The BGC Research Centre focuses on biblical and practical gender studies, and how these intersect and inform the lives of women and men in the contemporary church. Dr Cobb and I are now working to set up an AHRC funded research network around the topic Abusing God: Reading the Bible in the #MeToo Age

In addition to researching gender-based violence and the Hebrew Bible, I continue to be interested in cultural feminisations of transgressive knowledge and magic in the West from antiquity to today (‘Serpentine Saviours and Woke Women: When the Satanic Witch Met Eve in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ in Zanne Domoney-Lyttle and Rebekah Welton (eds) Cultural Bibles in Popular Visual Entertainment (Scriptural Traces: London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark 2024), including convening the symposium Hexing the Patriarchy, Spellcasting for Change and Demonic Democracies: Explorations of Magical Activism and Enchanted Politics.

My ongoing research interests include the Hebrew Bible, biblical reception, gender-based violence and the Bible, vknowledge, magical and spiritual activism, heresy and gender and visual art and biblical literature.

I have written on biblical literature, gender, feminist activism, trauma, abuse and the visual arts and popular culture (see publications page for more information).

Awards

• Institute for Teaching and Learning Teaching Excellence Award for Inclusive Teaching, 2021.
• Student’s Union Award for Inclusive Teaching Practice, 2021.
• Outstanding Teaching Award in the Humanities 2020-21.

I currently co-supervise a number of PhD students working in various areas of biblical studies, gender and feminist theory, reception criticism and hermeneutics.

I welcome enquiries to discuss projects involving feminist and gender studies approaches to the Bible and the Bible and its reception (especially visual criticism/Bible and the visual arts and popular and political cultures).