Professor Jeremy Carrette, from the Department of Religious Studies, has won a British Academy Small Research Grant for a project entitled ‘William James on Love: Literature, Biography and the Divine-Human Relation’.
William James (1842-1910) was one of the founding figures of the psychology of religion, established through his 1902 Edinburgh Gifford lectures, ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’. Despite the fact that love is a key emotion in religious experience and Christian thinking, there have been no previous studies of the issue in James’ work. Jeremy’s research will address this gap, and seek to reflect on how we speak of love.
The personal dimension of love creates a challenge to how love can be brought into academic discourse, but James’ focus on experience allows us to explore love at the boundaries of his use of literature, personal biography and theology. This reveals both the complexity of love as a discourse and its interdisciplinary emergence.
The research grant will enable Jeremy to access James’ unpublished diaries, notebooks and unpublished papers held at the Houghton Library, University of Harvard, to explore these alongside themes of psychology and theology of love in James’ main works to provide a rigorous account of his biography in relation to love.
For more details about BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants, please see the page here: www.britac.ac.uk/ba-leverhulme-small-research-grants