Exploring Christian Literature in the Contemporary and Secular University

David Aers is James B. Duke Professor of English and Historical Theology, with appointments in both the English Department and the Divinity School. His work on medieval and early modern literature, theology, and political culture ranges across disciplinary and temporal boundaries, with a deep interest in tracing the nuances and complexities of Christian tradition and its relations to culture, politics, and ethics across the medieval/early modern divide. His most recent publications include Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton (Notre Dame UP, 2020), which explores concepts of Predestination and Reprobation in Christian tradition from the Middle Ages through the Reformation; and (with co-editor Sarah Beckwith) a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on “Imagining the Virtues: Medieval and Early Modern Histories” (July 2022), devoted to examining the aftermaths of the Reformation on habits, practices, and conceptualizations of virtue and virtue ethics.

Currently, Aers is working on a broad-ranging exploration of how the Reformation transformed understandings of God and humanity in relation to medieval Christian teachings. The book’s working title is Disappearing Jesus. He has published two essays related to this project, “Calvinist Versions of God: A Revolution in Medieval Tradition” in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (July 2022) and “The Letter Kills but the Spirit Gives Life (2 Corinthians 3:6): Or, What Happened to Enemy Love?” in Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (2024), a volume honouring Prof. James Simpson. Continuing this research, in May 2024 Aers gave an invited symposium paper at King’s College, Cambridge on Milton’s changing hermeneutics and the license for Christian violence. 

David Aers continues as co-editor of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and is currently Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Duke.

"THOMAS PFAU (PhD 1989, SUNY Buffalo) is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English, with a secondary appointment in the Divinity School at Duke University. He has published some fifty essays on literary, philosophical, and theological subjects ranging from the 18^ththrough the early 20^th century. In addition to two translations, of Hölderlin and Schelling (SUNY Press, 1987 and 1994), he has also edited seven essay collections and special journal issues and is the author of four monographs: Wordsworth’s Profession (Stanford UP 1997), Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, 1790-1840 (Johns Hopkins UP 2005),  Minding the Modern: Intellectual Traditions, Human Agency, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame UP, 2013), and Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame UP, 2022). He in the early stages of a new book project focused on the relationship between poetry and theology from 1800 to the present.