Event Details

English Literature and Creative Writing Open Theology Seminar – God and the Body. Dr Elizabeth Ludlow (Anglia Ruskin University), Rev Dr Mark Vesey-Saunders (St Hild College) and time for discussion

Open Theology Seminar – God and the Body

Dr Lizzie Ludlow (Anglia Ruskin University) - Prayer and the Body in Nineteenth Century Women’s Writing.

and

Rev Dr Mark Vesey-Saunders (St Hild College) - The Body and the Body: the Church and its Members

Lizzie Ludlow joined Anglia Ruskin University in 2014, having taught previously at the Universities of Warwick, British Columbia, Bristol, and Birmingham. Her research specialisms include religion and literature and nineteenth-century poetry, fiction, and life-writing. Her first monograph, Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), contextualises Rossetti’s work in the light of her engagement with ancient, medieval, Early Modern, and nineteenth-century literature and provides the first sustained discussion of her contributions to periodicals and devotional anthologies. Her edited collection, The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2020), includes sixteen essays that respond to the theological turn in postmodern thought by asking vital questions about the way in which representations of Christ shape understandings of personhood and of the divine. In addition to these books, Elizabeth has written chapters and articles on subjects including the legacy of St. Monica of Hippo, the nineteenth-century Early Church novel, Elizabeth Gaskell and religion, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s historical fiction. Her current project focuses on representations of the profound theological depths of embodied experience in nineteenth-century women’s writing.

Mark Vesey-Saunders studied English Literature and History in York at the then University College of Ripon & York St John, and is the author The Scandal of Evangelicals and Homosexuality (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2015). After graduation, he worked for IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students) in Ukraine for 2 years, before returning home to pursue ordination. He trained at Cranmer Hall, Oxford, and then went on to serve his curacy at St Mary the Virgin, Ponteland, in Newcastle Diocese. Whilst in Newcastle Diocese he was part of the Diocesan Evangelism Taskgroup that delivered a MAP-based Mission Strategy for the diocese. After the completion of his curacy he worked as University Chaplain at Newcastle University, and then as a Team Vicar & Pioneer Minister in the Retford Area Team Ministry in Southwell & Nottingham Diocese. During this time he was a tutor delivering Lay Reader training for the All Saints Centre for Mission & Ministry course. He completed his part-time PhD from Durham on Evangelical responses to homosexuality in 2013. He was appointed Academic Tutor at St Hild College in 2017. He oversees the formation of part time and full time Anglican ordinands at Barnabas Teaching Centre. He leads modules in Doctrine, Advanced Christian Ethics and Mission Entrepreneurship.