Professor David Clines, Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield, has donated a significant collection of books on Biblical Studies and Religious Studies to the Department of Religious Studies at Kent, which will be housed in the Templeman Library and will be a major resource for the teaching of these subjects at Kent.
Professor Clines is one of the most famous living scholars in Biblical and Religious Studies. He was a former President of the Society of Biblical Literature, and launched and ran Sheffield Academic Press, a landmark publishing house central to Biblical Studies and Religious Studies.
The library of Professor Clines is of interest to many disciplines within Kent, including Classics, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Comparative Literature, History and English Literature. The collection is very largely Biblical Studies, with a particular focus on Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, and includes excellent stock in Bible dictionaries, philology and language resources (e.g. Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic); history of interpretation; interpretation theory and ‘hermeneutics’. The collection also provides in depth material for the reception history of the Bible (from the first century to the present day) including a collection of approximately 600 primary texts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It will provide major resources for scholars in Jewish Studies in various disciplines across the University and will be an important resource for the Centre for Early Christianity and its Reception.
The Department of Religious Studies at Kent has grown since 2013 with the appointment of two new staff members together with the recruitment of four new PhD students working on projects in Biblical Studies. The Department has also developed four new undergraduate modules in Biblical Studies, which are fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature and are designed to attract students from a variety of disciplines.
This collection will provide much needed resources for both staff and students and the donation of this library puts Kent at the centre of cutting edge research in Religious Studies and Biblical Studies.