Dr. Chris Meredith

Teaching Fellow in Hebrew Bible

My research explores the intersections between the Hebrew biblical texts and critical and cultural theory, paying particular attention to questions of spatiality, sexuality, gender and the instability of meaning in sacred texts.

My doctoral thesis looked at questions of literary spatiality, using the Song of Songs to interrogate the spatiality of text itself and to analyse the processes of identity formation (gendered, embodied, readerly and cultural) that go on in textual spaces. I am particularly interested in matchmaking biblical texts with a variety of (sometimes unexpected) intellectual and cultural bedfellows and then reading in peculiar directions. What connections, rifts, or shocks do interdisciplinary readings of biblical texts produce? What orthodoxies—ancient and modern, intellectual and popular—might such readings disrupt? And in what ways might these strange literary relationships inform our approaches to contemporary social and discursive spaces?

Research Interests:

• The Bible and critical theory
• Literary and ritual spatialities
• Gender and sexuality studies, post-feminism, queer hermeneutics
• Popular cultural re-appropriations of Old Testament texts
• The literary afterlives of biblical figures
• The works of Walter Benjamin, and their relationship to Jewish religion and spirituality

Recent Publications:

'The Lattice and the Looking Glass: Gendered Space in Song of Songs 2:8-14', Journal of the American Academy of Religion, June 2012, Vol. 80, No. 2, pp. 1–22.

Review of Stuart Macwilliam, Queer Theory and the Prophetic Marriage Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible; published in The Bible and Critical Theory, Vol.8, 2012, No.1, pp.73-75.

'A Case of Open and Shut: The Five Thresholds of 1 Samuel 1:1-7:2’, Biblical Interpretation 18 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 137-157