Research and Teaching
I read philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, completing my PhD in 2015. Previously, I earned an MPhil in philosophical theology from Oxford, an MA in religious studies from Stanford, and a BA in literary studies and philosophy from the University of Toronto. I taught for two years at Barrett Honours College (Arizona State University), before moving to the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in 2017.
My work falls under three interrelated areas: metaphysics, aesthetics, and nature. My research examines how changes in metaphysics have influenced how human beings understand and interact with nature; how Platonic realism has shaped Western thought in both orthodox and heterodox ways; and how aesthetics has provided a language for expressing spirituality both within and beyond religious traditions. I work with materials from antiquity to the present, with most of my publications focused on the modern period, particularly Romanticism. Details about my current research can be found under the projects section.
I have taught courses on the philosophy of religion, sacred and secular understandings of nature, and mysticism and literature. In these courses, my students and I examine how meaning is made through philosophy, how spiritual affect is expressed in aesthetics, and how both are shaped in religion.
Areas of Research and Publication
Philosophy of religion: I focus upon the complex and creative relationship between Christianity and Platonism. This is explored in my most recent book, The Metaphysics of Divine Participation (Cambridge, 2025). It is also the subject of Christian Platonism: A History (Cambridge, 2021). I am the series editor for Cambridge Elements in the History of Philosophy and Theology, and the general editor for the five-volume History of Platonism in the Modern Age.
Religion and aesthetics: I concentrate on the interaction among poetics, metaphysics, and spirituality. This is the subject of my work on nature writing, mystical poetics, and Romanticism. Much of my work in this area examines the German Sattelzeit, the tempestuous and fecund period of transition from the early modern to the modern period, as well as the work of Traherne and Coleridge. This research is published in numerous articles and the book Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion (Cambridge, 2019).
Christianity and the environment: Encompassing both philosophy and aesthetics, my current work examines the fundamental relationship between religion, nature and culture, as explored in the Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment (Cambridge, 2023) and Pandemic, Ecology and Theology (Routledge, 2020). This is the focus of my current project on Participation in Nature.
