Biography

Dr Rebekah Lamb-Varela is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Theology and the Arts in the School of Divinity and a staff member of the Institute of Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) at the University of St Andrews. She is also Director of Teaching in Theology and Biblical Studies.

Prior to joining St Andrews, Dr Lamb-Varela was the inaugural Étienne Gilson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in Victorian and Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature, with an emphasis on religion and literature, and her Master's in English Literature from Western University (London, ON, Canada). She holds an Honours BA in Liberal Arts from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (New Hampshire, USA and Rome, Italy).

Teaching 

DI5451: Christian Doctrine and the Arts.                                            
DI5925: Theology and the Arts (Distance Learning)                          
DI5453: Practical Criticism                                                                    
DI5080: Guided Study (Joseph Pieper)                                                
DI4751: CS Lewis and the Inklings (2027 onward)                              
DI4936: Theology and Literature                                                            
DI2011: Religion Today                                                                            
DI2009: Saints & Cyborgs: The Imagination in Theology and Science

Research Areas

Dr Lamb-Varela's primary area of research is Theology and the Arts, particularly religion and literature, theological aesthetics, and Christian doctrine's influence on popular culture from 1750 to the present. Her second strand of research in Systematic and Historical Theology focuses on Mariology, especially its reception in the Victorian context; sacramental theology; and the history of global modern Catholic literary revivals, particularly the recovery of women writers whose work invites us to rethink several secular assumptions of Modernist literary and cultural studies.

Shaped by her training in the classical liberal arts, her work is interdisciplinary by nature, bringing literary and cultural studies into conversation with theological aesthetics and concerns central to systematic and historical theology, particularly Christology, Ecclesiology, Soteriology, and Anthropology. Her work treats the arts not simply as objects of theological interpretation but as distinctive, irreplaceable modes of theological inquiry and disclosure in their own right.

Her current work includes the theology of consolation in modernity, Catholic women's writing (1850-present), John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti, Thérèse of Lisieux, J. R. R. Tolkien, and, more broadly, the relationships between Catholicism, modernity, and the literary imagination.

Publications and Projects 

Dr Lamb-Varela is Co-Principal Investigator on the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded project Catholic Women Writers in Scotland and Beyond. Its primary output is the first Handbook of Catholic Women Writers, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2028, which she is co-editing with scholars from Cambridge, Edinburgh, the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas, and Warwick.

Her first monograph, Writing Charity: Consolations in Modernity (McGill-Queen's University Press, forthcoming 2027), offers a constructive account of the theology of consolation in the writings of John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti, Thérèse of Lisieux, and J. R. R. Tolkien. It considers how modern Christian accounts of charity engage with and re-evaluate the hermeneutics of disenchantment and scepticism predominant in modern literary studies.

With Michael D. Hurley (Cambridge), she co-edited a volume on John Henry Newman's aesthetic and religious sense (Religion and Literature, 2023). Her other publications include articles, encyclopedia and handbook entries, book chapters, and review essays in Religion and Literature, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing, New Blackfriars, Theology in Scotland, Nova et Vetera, Church Life Journal, Magnificat, and elsewhere.

Academic Service and Outreach

Dr Lamb-Varela serves on the editorial boards of Newman Studies Journal and CTS Academic. She is an elected Arts and Humanities representative on University Senate and an associate staff member of the Scottish Catholic Studies Arts Lab at the University of Glasgow. On behalf of the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst, she served on the Commisioning Group that advised on the design of the Tolkien Memorial, to be unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner in 2027. She also speaks for public-facing outlets including BBC Scotland and Thomistic Institute chapers, as well as at conferences, workshops, chaplaincies, and parishes on topics relating to her research, the humanities, and Catholic theology.

Theology and Literature; Theological Aesthetics; Literary Theory; Ethics and Anthropology; Victorian Culture; Modernist Studies; Christian Doctrine and the Arts; The Liberal Arts; Christianity and Culture; Liturgy and Culture; Contemporary Literature; Mariology; Catholic Literary Revivals; Sacramental Theology; Theological Anthropology