THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Information for prospective students
Information for current students
About the Department
Research
Jo Carruthers
RCUK Academic Fellow
BA (Manchester), MA (Manchester), PhD (Manchester)
Phone: 0117 331 7717
Fax: 0117 331 7933
E-mail: Jo.Carruthers@bristol.ac.uk
Biography
Jo Carruthers’ undergraduate and postgraduate work, although primarily in English Studies, has crossed into the disciplines of Theology and Cultural Studies. She completed her undergraduate degree in Combined Studies (in the departments of Theology, English Studies and American Studies) and her MA in Cultural Criticism at Manchester University. Her PhD thesis, also at Manchester in the department of English Studies supervised by Professor Gerald Hammond, was on literary rewritings (broadly defined) of the biblical Book of Esther.
Research
She joined the department of Theology and Religious Studies in September 2005 and is working with the university theme of ‘Performativity | Place | Space’ in both the English and Theology and Religious Studies departments, reflecting the cross-disciplinary focus of her research work. She is now working on the Jewish festival of Purim, at which the reading of the Esther story is central. She is currently working on two book-length studies on Purim and the Purimspiel.
Both projects (on Esther and on Purim) concentrate on the relation between narrative and identity construction. Key interests for her include: models of language and communication; reception theory; the relation between identity and text; theories of performativity (both texts and identity as performative); the relation between national and religious identity. I would be delighted to supervise research related to my interests in literature and religious and/or national identity.
Publications (including in press and forthcoming):
As well as my book-length study of Purim, I am also currently working on:
- Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination, edited by Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate (Peter Lang, 2009).
- ‘Esther and Hitler: The Personification of Evil’ for the Oxford Companion to the Reception of the Bible (OUP, 2009).
- ‘Ritual and Hereditary Religion: Unravelling Israel Zangwill’s “Christianized Judaism”’ for Religion, Literature and the Imagination (Continuum, 2009)
- ‘Ahasuerus’ and ‘Alpha and Omega’ for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Walter de Gruyter, 2009).
- An Introduction to the Reception of the Bible, with John Lyons (Continuum, 2010).
- Secular Scripture: Englishness, Nationalism and Protestantism (Continuum, 2011).
Books
Esther Through the Centuries (Blackwell, 2007).
Articles and Chapters:
- ‘Writing, Interpretation and the Book of Esther: A Detour via Browning and Derrida’, Yearbook of English Studies (forthcoming 2009).
- ‘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, forthcoming 2009).
- ‘Laying Hold of Divine Riches’: Self-Authorization in Christina Rossetti’s The Face of the Deep (1892)’, in The Way the World Ends?: The Apocalypse of John in Culture and Ideology, eds. William John Lyons and Jorunn Oklunnd (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008), pp. 43-59.
- ‘The Liminal Becoming of the Rebel Vashti’, Mapping Liminality: Thresholds in Literary and Cultural Texts, eds. Lucy Kay, Zoe Kinsley, Terry Philips and Alan Roughley (Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 91-109.
- ‘Literature’ in Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, ed. by John Sawyer (Blackwell, 2006).
- ‘Nationalism’ in Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, ed. by John Sawyer (Blackwell, 2006).
- ‘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, 2005).
- ‘“Neither Maide, Wife or Widow”: Ester Sowernam and the Book of Esther’, Prose Studies 26.3 (2003), 321-343.