Humanities Stream

Friday 20 March (1:00 pm to 9:00 pm) and Sat 21 March (9:00 am to 4:00 pm) 2026

New College (Friday) and Jesus College (Saturday)

Convener: Laura Higgins, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Drama, Oxford Brookes University

Student Convener:  Shelby Knighten, DPhil, Education

For the follower of Christ working in the humanities, what is the relationship between faith and research? What vision(s) of the humanities does faith in Christ propose? How does the Christian scholar in the humanities conceive of their work ontologically and spiritually? How might Christian faith inform, augment, or reshape the methods of our respective humanities disciplines? Join us as we grapple with these questions, seeking wisdom in Christ through a programme of prayer, lecture, discussion, and friendship for anyone with a love for the humanities.

Speakers for the 2026 Conference include Karen Coats (Education), Casey Strine (Ancient Near-Eastern History and Literature), and Christopher Blakey (Music and Theology).

**Please note our eligibility criteria: This event is for University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes postgraduates, postdocs, academic staff. If you do not fit this criteria, are DCM Alumni, or in a continuing education program, please complete this form and we will review your request **

Friday 20th March

1:00 pm Registration in New College with coffee & tea

1:30 pm Welcome and Introductions

2:00 pm Vision Talk – Music, Harmony, and Emergence: A Christian Approach to Particularity in the Arts and Humanities - Christopher Blakey (Theomousikos Coordinator, Renaissance Project, Wycliffe Hall)

What does it mean to be a Christian scholar in the arts and humanities? How do we resist reductionism and faithfully respond to the particularities of our fields of study? What can music offer to help us address these questions? Music has an exceptionally fraught methodologically history; being both part of the medieval quadrivium and, in Walter Pater’s famous aphorism, having the condition to which ‘all art constantly aspires’. In particular, the property of harmony forces us to confront both the stubborn particularities of the arts, and the interconnectedness of all forms of knowledge. This talk explores the concept of musical harmony, and its surprising emergent properties, as a case study in how a Christian ontology and theology of creation might enrich our approach as scholars in the arts and humanities.

3:30 pm Coffee & tea

4:00 pm Panel Discussion - Responses to Vision Talk

This panel will bring together scholars in dance, film, music, and theatre to consider implications and extensions of the points outlined in the opening vision talk in developing a vision of Christian scholarship.

The following events are held jointly with all streams at New College.

6:00 pm Prayer in New College Chapel

6:30 pm Drinks at the New College Bar

7:30 pm Dinner in the New College Dining Hall

Saturday 21st March

9:00 am Registration in Jesus College with coffee & tea

9:05 am Prayer

9:30 am Small Group Discussion on Assigned Readings

To frame the day’s talks and activities, participants should read and reflect upon the following texts prior to this session: for Casey Strine’s talk, Simone Weil’s “Reflections on the Right Use of Schools Studies with a View to the Love of God” and for Karen Coats’s seminar, Malcolm Guite’s series of antiphon poems. In small groups, participants will discuss these texts.

11:00 am Coffee & tea

11:30 am Research Talk – Christian Researchers, Their Materials, and Theological Anthropology - Casey Strine (Secretary for Theology and Theological Adviser to the House of Bishops, Church of England, and Senior Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern History and Literature, University of Sheffield)

One way to explore what it means to be a follower of Christ in the world of academia is to ask what is the relationship between the Christian researcher and the object(s) of their research. This language—familiar to many—presumes a certain relationship between the researcher and their work. Should a follower of Christ accept this relationship to their research? Does the relationship presumed by the idea of researcher as subject and topic as research object comport with a Christian theological anthropology? What would it mean to attend to one’s research if this is the relationship? This talk will engage with these questions, thinking with the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, the Ignatian tradition, and Simone Weil in order to catalyse reflection on the experience of Christians in academia.

1:00 pm Lunch

2:00 pm Methodology Seminar – Prayer and Method: Towards a Christian Grammar of Research Design - Karen Coats (Director of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature and Professor of Education, University of Cambridge)

Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design by Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (whose titles serve as the inspiration for the title of this talk) explore methodologies relevant to research in the humanities. These works are concerned with the way we come to understand facets of the world through social semiotics—Gadamer’s focus is language and Kress and Van Leeuwen look at images. In bringing these frameworks together, we will consider how and what we have been taught about how to approach research, be it desk-based or with human participants. This talk works from the assumption that many if not most of us have been trained to think in non-theistic or even atheist way and that this has fundamentally clouded our vision of what it means to undertake humanistic research, inducting us into a hermeneutics of suspicion and cultural  relativism rather than a hermeneutics of faith that can lead to a true and unapologetic understanding of what it means for humans to be made in the image of God and yet fallen. This talk will outline the programmes, possibilities, and ultimate limitations of current protocols of research inspired by these thinkers and ask: What if, instead, we really commit to expanding what Gadamer calls our ‘fusion of horizons’ to include a third Person by integrating ongoing prayer into our research designs from start to finish? How might it change the grammar of our work if we understood, in the words of Kenneth Grahame in The Reluctant Dragon, that ‘the noun governs the verb’ and that the most important pronoun in all our work is ‘His’? In preparation for this session, participants should locate a prayer about study (for example, St. Thomas Aquinas’s prayer for students).

3:30 pm Synthesis

4:00 pm  Closing