Research seminars and events

Unless otherwise noted, seminars take place online on Mondays from 2–3:30pm.

Please email m.j.warren@sheffield.ac.uk for the link to join.

10 March

Ela Nutu Hall (University of Sheffield)

How Salomé Fell for the Baptist, or John the Baptist as L’Homme Fatal: Artistic Interpretations of a Biblical Narrative 

According to the Bible, John the Baptist is executed by decapitation at the request of a little girl. The biblical account is very brief, yet Herodias’ daughter (known later as Salome) has become for many the quintessential femme fatale. Her metamorphosis is largely due to Salomé’s power to inspire artists, whose sensory interpretations of the biblical narrative have, in turn, left an indelible mark on the readers’ imagination. For example, when Oscar Wilde used the biblical narrative as inspiration for his play Salomé (1891), one of the criticisms that he received was that it had a ‘nauseating’ effect on the audience, most strikingly due to Salomé’s sexual interest in the Baptist (which culminates in her kissing the decapitated head of the prophet on the mouth). This sexual element is completely absent from the biblical text, so how did it emerge? Is Oscar Wilde responsible for it? Is it typical of his time? Pablo Picasso also chose to portray Salomé naked and, intriguingly, placed in the midst of itinerant acrobats, musicians and clowns. Picasso’s Salomé etching (1905) depicts her dancing in front of Herod; her complete nakedness exposed to him, her left leg kicking the air. But how did John the Baptist become the poster boy for biblical masculinity? As another example, the figure of the Baptist emerging from Auguste Rodin’s bronze statue ‘Saint John the Baptist’ (1880) does certainly exude virility: naked, tall, purposeful, with clearly defined muscles, proud genitalia and legs apart. Rodin is not alone in depicting the Baptist in sexualised tones.  This paper investigates the complex relationships between the biblical text and some of its literary and artistic interpretations, with a particular focus on the emergence of Salomé as femme fatale and the Baptist’s as the archetype of virile masculinity – l’homme fatal (?) – in fin-de-siècle Europe. 

17 March

Matt Williams (Sir Henry Stephenson Research Fellow, University of Sheffield)

Spiting the Land That Feeds Us? Considering an Agrarian Concept of Home

‘Home’ is a sufficiently ubiquitous term in general parlance as to require no definition, at least it would seem. At the same time, competing understandings of – and claims to – home play an increasingly significant and divisive role in key political debates today. Generally lacking in Western conceptions of home, despite their wide diversity, is a sense of the importance of land (especially cultivatable land). Thinkers such as Wendell Berry and those influenced by him respond to this development with a self-consciously agrarian counterpoint, which resonates with the situation of subsistence farmers around the world in places such as Northern Malawi. What insight can be gained by putting these contemporary agrarian perspectives into dialogue with notions of home found in the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament? Is there a challenge here to rethink aspects of ‘development’ that have come to be taken for granted in the ‘developed’ world?

28 April

Tim Hutchings (Nottingham University)

The Bible in the RE Classroom: Education Reform, Worldviews and the Politics of Change

In the modern RE classroom, what place is there for the Bible? What value do today's curriculum developers place on textual knowledge or the skills of biblical study? How do teachers invite pupils to engage with the Bible, and how do pupils respond? 

Religious Education is a compulsory subject at all primary and secondary schools in England, but the curriculum is determined locally by hundreds of committees, trusts and other groups. Curriculum reform is essential to maintain the relevance of the subject in a rapidly changing society, but the RE community must negotiate with dozens of interest groups, teacher associations, faith communities, academy trusts, politicians and other stakeholders before any national programme of change can be implemented.  

For the last five years, the RE Council of England and Wales has tried to promote a new approach to the subject called "Religion and Worldviews", which moves beyond the classic World Religions approach to set RE on a new foundation. According to the RE Council, this new approach is interdisciplinary, academically rigorous, responsive to social change and relevant to non-religious as well as religious children. The Religion and Worldviews approach has been developed into a published handbook and a set of trial curricula and forms the basis for a new National Content Standard that aims to establish a shared national understanding of what quality looks like in Religious Education. Opponents of Religion and Worldviews have been outspoken and combative, arguing that this approach is too sociological, too relativistic, gives too much space to nonreligious perspectives and undermines the privileged place of Christian theology and religious philosophy within the curriculum. 

This paper explores what is happening to the Bible in this rapidly changing and fractious educational environment. Using interviews with curriculum developers and teachers and a survey of current classroom resources, we ask how the Bible fits into the new paradigm of Religion and Worldviews education. Is the Bible being left behind, as a relic of an outdated approach, or has teaching about the Bible managed to adapt? Better understanding of the contested place of biblical study in schools may indicate spaces and partnerships where future intervention into school education by academic biblical scholars would be welcomed. 

12 May

Lois McFarland (University of Edinburgh)

Queer Resistance to Apocalyptic Narratives in Speculative Fiction

Several recent works of speculative fiction feature queer characters resisting certain affective responses to impending apocalyptic destruction. Naomi Alderman’s The Future and Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking and its sequel The Shutouts are among those that portray sapphic love amidst global catastrophe, and the chance of rescue offered only to a privileged few. Alderman explicitly situates her novel in conversation with Gen. 18-19’s narrative of destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Korn’s novels can be read alongside the book of Revelation and other apocalyptic texts. This seminar explores the novels’ use of biblical narratives of destruction and asks how queer (biblical) scholarship offers ways of thinking through times of fear and crisis that are counter-apocalyptic (Catherine Keller), while still remaining future-oriented (Nicole Seymour).