Dr. Rebekah Lamb specialises in theology and the arts, particularly religion and literature and visual culture, in late modernity with emphasis on the Victorian period. Her research centres on the ways in which art and aesthetics can be distinctive and timely modes of theology in their own right. Key figures in her work include John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites as well as their inheritors (JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, among others).

Prior to joining St Andrews, she was the Étienne Gilson Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (St Michael's College) and received her PhD in Victorian and Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature as well as her Masters in English Literature from Western University (London, ON, Canada).  She holds an Honours BA in Liberal Arts Studies from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and studied at the College's campuses in New Hampshire, USA and Rome, Italy.

Teaching 

DI2009: Saints & Cyborgs: The Imagination in Theology and Science. Co-taught with Dr. Joanna Leidenhag and Dr. Gavin Hopps

DI4936: Theology and Literature

DI5451: Christian Doctrine and the Arts

DI5925: Theology and the Arts (Distance Learning)

DI5453: Practical Criticism

Junior Honours Research Seminar (JHRS)

DI5080: Guided Study (Joseph Pieper)

Research Areas:

Dr. Lamb focuses on intersections between theology, visual arts and literature in late modernity. She recently co-edited a volume for Religion and Literature (2023) on John Henry Newman with Michael D. Hurley (Cambridge) which offers the most sustained, interdisciplinary account of Newman's theological aesthetics, to date. She is finishing a book (with McGill-Queen's University Press) on the theological nature of discontent in Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, and in the writings of twentieth-century Pre-Raphaelite inheritors--notably, JRR Tolkien and Marshal McLuhan, among others. Her second book project is a comprehensive appraisal of the influence of Mariology on John Henry Newman's aesthetics.

She has published articles, encyclopedia entries, book chapters, and review essays in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, New Blackfriars, Religions, Theology in Scotland, Nova et Vetera, Church Life Journal, Religion and Literature, Magnificat, Convivium, and elsewhere.

Dr. Lamb frequently writes for public-facing journals and magazines and  is often invited to speak on topics relating to her research, the public humanities, and theology's influence on culture.

Religion and Literature; Theological Aesthetics; Literary Theory; Victorian Culture; Christian Doctrine and the Arts; The Liberal Arts; Christianity and Culture