International Women’s Day: Inspirational figures

To mark this year’s International Women’s Day, Religious Studies academics have put together a list of inspirational women that you need to know about!

Dr Chris Deacy chose George Eliot (1819-1880) as his inspirational figure for International Women’s Day. In her day, Mary Ann Evans had to use a pseudonym in order to stand a chance of getting her books published, and she isn’t just an outstanding English novelist! From a Religious Studies perspective,  she made a key contribution to debates in the 19th century regarding moral problems with traditional religious thinking, including substitionary atonement and Hell.

Professor Jeremy Carrette’s International Women’s Day spotlight is Grace Jantzen (1948-2006) a pioneer in the feminist philosophy of religion. Originally from Canada, most of her career was spent in the UK, with posts at King’s College, London & the University of Manchester. Her published works began by examining embodiment and transcendence in God’s World, God’s Body (1984) and was followed by studies on mystical experience, with Julian of Norwich (1987) and her ground-breaking work Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (1995).

She showed that who counts as a mystic is a gendered question. In her next work, Becoming Divine: Towards A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998), she engaged French feminist thinking to challenge the Western philosophical focus on death by introducing the concepts of natality and birth as new foundations for philosophy. This provided the basis of her three-volume study Death and the Displacement of Beauty (2004, 2009, 2010), developing a philosophy of beauty.

Nicole Graham highlights the influence of bell hooks on her teaching, research & journey to feminism: hooks lays the groundwork for feminist theory and opens up your mind to realities & possibilities – she has certainly challenged the lens with which I view the world!.

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