Office Hours for Semester 1 2025:  Monday 13.00-14.00; Tuesday 14.30-15.30

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 have recently completed a 2 year funded project: Abusing God: Reading the Bible in the #MeToo Age Outputs from this are forthcoming.

I am currently writing a monograph focused on the the myriad ways in which the image of Woman and the notion of the nation often coalesce within the symbolic order of the Hebrew Bible, with a particular interest in how this social imaginary can led to cultures of abuse and misogyny.

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, knowledge, visual cultures / popular cultures and biblical literature magical and spiritual activism, heresy and gender and feminisms (see also publications list).

With Dr Siobhán Jolley, I am co-editor of Visual Arts for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception

I have helped to launch and co-ordinate the University of Manchester collaboration with BBC Radio 4's programme Beyond Belief. Our website Going Beyond Belief is a learning tool aimed at helping RS A level students and their teachers access our research within the Department of Religions and Theology and the BBC Beyond Belief archive.

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).