Dr Kathryn Wills
Associate Member, Las Casas Institute
Dr Kathryn Wills is a teacher and an independent researcher. Her main interests are in Literature and Theology, particularly the translations by Yves Bonnefoy of the works of WB Yeats and Shakespeare. She is interested particularly in the idea of Bonnefoy’s sacramental versions of Yeats’ Protestant focus on the word, and considers how the writings of Jean-Luc Marion, the French Catholic phenomenologist, illuminate this dichotomy. Her study of Literature and Theology illuminates the contrast between a French Catholic poetics and an English Protestant poetics.
She is also reviews editor of The International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church and has just guest-edited a special issue on Catholic Social Thought.
Her current research in Practical Theology explores the nature of a Theology of Liberation in the context of performance art, and on behalf of those who are excluded from mainstream Christian Churches by reason of physical or intellectual disability and gender and sexual identity.
She holds MAs in Philosophy and Theology, and in Medicine and Literature, and a PhD in Literature and Theology from Glasgow University’s Centre for Literature, Theology and the Creative Arts.
Publications
Book: A Sacerdotal Poetics: Yves Bonnefoy’s Reforging of WB Yeats ( 2023 Wipf and Stock: Oregon).
Book Chapter:
Wills, K, “Impersonal Beings, or Personal Thresholds of Incarnated Wonder? An Examination of the Beloved Women of Bonnefoy, Dante and Yeats in the Light of Maurice Blanchot’s ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’”. M Potter et al (eds), In Wonder, Love and Praise: Approaches to Poetry, Theology and Philosophy, (Peter Lang: Berlin, 2019)
Articles:
K A Wills, “Exclusive Church, Performance Art, and Liberative Theologies” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, forthcoming, 2024.
Reviews:
Lorraine Cuddeback-Gedeon: The Work of Inclusion: An Ethnography of Grace, Sin and Disabilities (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). In The International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, July 2023
Jock Stein, Temple and Tartan: Psalms, Poetry, and Scotland (Haddington: Handsel Press, 2022). In The International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, June 2023
Anne Elvey, Reading with Earth: Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics, Bloomsbury. 2022. In The International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, March 2023.
Email: kathryn.wills@cantab.net