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Dr Jo Carruthers

Lecturer

Degree: BA Hons (Manchester), MA (Manchester), PhD (Mancheser)

Current Teaching

I teach on the undergraduate courses: The Theory and Practice of Criticism and Victorian Literature and give lectures on Contemporary Writing and the core first-year English courses. I am offering an MA course, 'Victorian Extremes: The Coming of Modernity'.

Research Interests

I studied English and Theology at Manchester University as an undergraduate, where I also received an MA in Cultural Criticism and PhD on a reception history of 'The Strange and Difficult Book of Esther'. I was RCUK Research Fellow across the departments of English and Theology and then Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol until September 2011, when I moved to Lancaster. My research focuses on the English Bible and literature; English national identity; Jewish ritual and diasporic identities (focusing on the festival of Purim); and theories and practices of place.

My first book, Esther through the Centuries (Blackwell, 2008), was a reception history of the biblical Book of Esther, and I have published various articles and chapters on the influence of the Esther narrative on specific literary texts. More recently I have published England's Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic (Continuum, 2011), which explores the influence of Reformed Protestant thought on historical constructions of English simplicity and argues for an aesthetic element in contemporary English Islamophobic discourse.

Whilst at Bristol, I convened a university-wide cross-disciplinary research group on 'Place and Space' and with Angela Piccini, ran an AHRC-funded Network on 'Living in a Material World: The Performativities of Emptiness' (see http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/materialworld/11).

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I am keen to supervise in the area of the Bible and literature, Englishness, and religion and literature. I have supervised PhDs on 'Byron's Religious Influences' and 'Herbert's Distant God'.

Publications

Books

England's Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic, New Directions in Religion and Literature (Continuum, 2011).

This book interrogates the relations between Reformation ideas of plain style, the coupling of simplicity with a hermeneutic of transparency (as expressed in simple Englishness in Victorian and early twentieth-century literature), and the visceral aversion to the non-simple expressed in Islamophobia in contemporary England.

Chapters:

1. The English Reformation: Spenser, Milton and the Protestant Aesthetic

2. Secularizing the Protestant Aesthetic: Wordsworth, Eliot and Hardy

3. Contemporary Englishness and the Protestant Aesthetic

4. English Dispositions and Islamophobia

Esther Through the Centuries (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 2008).

Reviews for Esther Through the Centuries:

'absolutely fascinating book written in a stunning style'... 'When referring to theatre pieces or films, the author vividly sketches the scene. Although the same sorts of sources are quoted and elaborated on, it is truly remarkable that the book does not become boring or self-explanatory; to the contrary, the constant input of more and more sources turns the reading of this book into a stimulating adventure, that on not one page forgets to add an unexpected element nor make a rightful comment.' Kristen de Troyer, Journal of Theological Studies 62.1 (2011).

'undoubtedly a tour de force of sources in English and English translation', J. W. Rogerson, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61 (2010), 154-5.

There have also been reviews in: Hebraic Political Studies, Religious Studies Review, Expository Times, Review of Biblical Literature.

Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination, co-edited with Andrew Tate (Peter Lang, 2009).

Articles and Chapters

'Esther and Hitler: The Personification of Evil' in The Oxford Companion to the Reception of the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 515-528.

'Biblical Epic and the American State: The Traitor and Sanctified Violence in Esther and the King (1960)', in Understanding Religion and Violence in Popular Culture, eds. Eric Christianson and Christopher Partridge (Equinox, 2010), pp. 42-52.

'Writing, Interpretation and the Book of Esther: A Detour via Browning and Derrida', Yearbook of English Studies 39.1-2 (2009), 58-71.

'Ritual and Hereditary Religion: Unravelling Israel Zangwill's "Christianized Judaism"' in Religion, Literature and the Imagination, ed. by Mark Knight and Louise Lee (Continuum, 2009), pp. 75-86.

'Laying Hold of Divine Riches: Self-Authorization in Christina Rossetti's The Face of the Deep', in The Way the World Ends: The Apocalypse of John in Culture and Ideology, ed. William John Lyons and Jorunn Okland (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), pp. 43-59.

'Stillness and Belonging: Mynydd Epynt', in Debateable Lands Vol II: 'These Debateable Lands', ed. by Iain Biggs (Bristol: Wild Conservations Press, 2009), pp. 27-33.

'Ahasuerus', in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Walter de Gruyter, 2009).

'Alpha and Omega', in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Walter de Gruyter, 2009).

'The Liminal Becoming of the Rebel Vashti', in Mapping Liminality: Thresholds in Literary and Cultural Texts, ed. Lucy Kay, Zoë Kinsley, Terry Philips and Alan Roughley (Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 91-109.

'Theological Legacies: Jews, Heresy, Race', in Figures of Heresy: Radical Theology in English and American Literature, 1830-2000, ed. by Andrew Dix and Jonathan Taylor (Sussex Academic Press, 2006), pp. 55-71.

'Literature' in Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, ed. by John Sawyer (Blackwell, 2006), pp. 253-267.

'Nationalism' in Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, ed. by John Sawyer Blackwell, 2006), pp. 480-496.

'"Neither Maide, Wife or Widow": Ester Sowernam and the Book of Esther', Prose Studies 26.3 (2003), 321-343.

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