Religion and Literature MTh, MSc

Programme Director: Dr Linden Bicket

Dr Linden Bicket’s research explores the rich spiritual dimensions of modern poetry and prose in English, with a particular focus on twentieth-century Catholic fiction and poetry, modern Scottish literature, and children's literature.

Her broader academic interests include the interplay between faith and scepticism in literary texts. She is currently writing a critical biography of the Catholic literary converts Ann and George Scott-Moncrieff for Edinburgh University Press and is part of the editorial team producing The Oxford Companion to Modern Catholic Women’s Writing.

Her recent publications include: 

• Scottish Religious Poetry from the Sixth Century to the Present (Saint Andrew Press, 2024), co-edited with Alison Jack and Emma Dymock
• A centenary edition of George Mackay Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry (Birlinn, 2021), co-edited with Kirsteen McCue
• George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
• numerous book chapters and journal articles on Scottish literature and religion

Professor Alison Jack

Alison Jack is Professor of Bible and Literature and Principal of New College. Her research interests lie in the fields of:

• the reception history of the Bible
• feminism and literary criticism
• the intertextuality of the Bible, and in particular of the Gospels and Revelation
• biblical allusions in English, Scottish and Irish literature, with a particular focus on poetry
• the parables of Jesus.

Her most recent publications include:

• Scottish Religious Poetry: From the Sixth Century to the Present (Saint Andrew Press, 2024), co-edited with Linden Bicket and Emma Dymock
• The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2018)
• journal articles and book chapters on the Bible in the work of Seamus Heaney, Marilynne Robinson, James Robertson, Emily Dickinson and Robert Louis Stevenson

She also has an academic interest in the intertextual use of the Bible in crime fiction.

Professor Hannah Holtschneider 

Professor Holtschneider is a cultural historian of contemporary Jewish history with an interest in literary representations of Jews. The focus of her work is the Shoah/Holocaust and its aftermath, particularly the long-term effect of the Holocaust on families, and the representation of the Holocaust and Jews in a variety of cultural media, particularly in Holocaust testimony.

Her wider research interests include early twentieth century Jewish history in Britain and Germany, and Jewish migration history. 

With Peter Davies, Sheila Jelen, and Christoph Thonfeld, she published Olga Lengyel, Auschwitz Survivor: Interdisciplinary Explorations, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). The same team of authors is working on a project on multiple testimonies of female prisoner physicians who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Dr Lois McFarland 

Dr Lois McFarland is a lecturer in Religion and Literature. Her research focuses on biblical re-vision in speculative fiction, asking how technology, societal change and climate crisis can trouble what it traditionally means to be human. Her work highlights feminist and womanist re-vision and theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, and affect theory.

She is the co-director of the New College Festival of Books and Belief and current chair of the Scottish Network for Religion and Literature.

Recent and upcoming publications include: 

• ‘“Suspicion is More Likely to Keep You Alive than Trust”: Affective Relationships with the Bible in Octavia Butler’s Parables’, Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, (2021)
• Creation and Apocalypse in Feminist Speculative Fiction, London: Bloomsbury Academic, (2026)
• ‘“Lesbians at the End of the World” in Naomi Alderman’s The Future (2023) and Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking (2023)’, forthcoming Foundation special issue (2026)