Speaker Bios
Justin Bailey, PhD Fuller – Assoc professor and Chair of the Theology Dept, Dordt University, Bailey is also an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church. He is the host of Culture & Faith podcast In All Things, and writes regularly for the associated online journal, as well as many other academic and popular journals. Author of both Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture and Reimagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age, the latter text of his dialogues at length with George MacDonald, Marilyn Robinson, and Charles Taylor. Bailey is Board Member of Center for Public Justice, Fellow of Center for Pastoral Theologians, and a member of St. Anselm’s Fellowship.
Julie Canlis, PhD St Andrews – Author and acclaimed Calvin scholar, Canlis is a sessional lecturer at Regent College Vancouver, and a guest lecturer to many institutions. Her research was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize, and her first book was awarded a Christianity Today Award in Theology. While raising four children, she produced the microbook A Theology of the Ordinary and developed the non-profit associated with her husband’s documentary Godspeed. She is also co-founder of The Abbey School in Scotland and is liturgical director for Trinity Church in Wenatchee, WA.
Malcolm Guite, PhD Durham – Life Fellow of Girton College Cambridge, Guite is an internationally renowned poet and speaker, in addition to being a Coleridge scholar, and scholar of Theology & Literature, and an Anglican priest. He is the President of the George MacDonald Society, and author of numerous works on Theology & the Imagination, Coleridge, and Poetry, including chapters on George MacDonald. His publications include Mariner, a spiritual biography of Coleridge, Theology & the Poetic Imagination, and Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God. His poetry volumes include Sounding the Seasons: 70 Sonnets for the Christian Year, Parable & Paradox, and the forthcoming epic poem, Merlin’s Isle – a re-telling of the Arthurian legends. He is also host of the YouTube series, A Spell in the Library.
Trevor Hart, PhD Aberdeen – Hart is Rector of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church, St Andrews and Canon Theologian of St Ninian’s Cathedral, Perth. He was was formerly Professor of Divinity and also founding Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the University of St Andrews. Trevor has lectured internationally and published widely on the importance of imagination for Christian faith, ministry and theology. He has supervised and examined much scholarship on MacDonald. His publications include Between the Image and the Word (Ashgate, 2013), Making Good: Creation, Creativity and Artistry (Baylor, 2014), Faith Thinking: The Dynamics of Christian Theology (Wipf & Stock, 2020) and most recently Confessing and Believing: The Apostles’ Creed as Script for the Christian Life (Fortress, 2022).
Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, PhD St Andrews – Jeffrey Johnson is an independent scholar and the director of ‘Windstone Farm Linlathen,’ a Theology, Ecology, & the Arts non-profit. She publishes and lectures widely on George MacDonald, Victorian Literature, the Inklings, and the integration of theology, ecology, and the arts. She is co-Chair of the George MacDonald Society, on the Advisory Board for SEVEN: An Anglo-Literary Review and for Northwind, and the Directing Board of CS Lewis & Kindred Soc of Eastern & Central Europe. Co-editor of Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald & the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy, recent MacDonald chapters can be found in The Inklings & Culture, Unsaying the Commonplace, and An Introduction to Child Theology. She has also written introductions for several new MacDonald publications, including Lilith and the full-text graphic novel of The Golden Key.
Kerry Magruder, PhD Oklahoma — Magruder is the Curator of the History of Science Collections of the University of Oklahoma Libraries. A faculty member of the OU Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, he is also the John and Drusa Cable Chair of the History of Science. Magruder’s publications deal with the history of geology, astronomy and cosmology, and science and religion. He has given papers at many academic conferences, universities, and research labs in America and across Europe. Presentations in America include at the Fermi Lab accelerator and NASA headquarters in Langley, VA, as well as astronomy/physics programs at New Mexico State, Michigan State, and Florida State, among many venues in the history of science. He has curated major exhibitions in the history of science at OU, including “Darwin at the Museum” in 2009-2010 and “Galileo’s World” in 2015-2016. His digital projects include Edition Open Sources, the Thomas F. Torrance Oral History Project, and The Sky Tonight.
David Mahan, PhD Cambridge — David Mahan completed his Master of Arts in Religion at Yale Divinity School (1995) and his PhD in Theology at the University of Cambridge (2005), focusing on theology and poetry. He is a Lecturer in Religion and Literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School, and Co-Director of the Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts (RCTA) at Yale. He specializes in modern to contemporary literature and its theological resonances, Christian poetics, and various literary genres, including literatures of trauma and [most recently] literature of enchantment. He has written on these subjects in various journals and in his bookAn Unexpected Light: Theology and Witness in the Poetry and Thought of Charles Williams, Micheal O’Siadhail, and Geoffrey Hill (Princeton Theological Monograph 2009).
M.G. Piety, PhD McGill — Piety is a Kierkegaard scholar and Professor of Philosophy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She translated Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs for Oxford University Press. Piety is the author of Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology for Baylor University Press and numerous articles on Kierkegaard, and philosophy more generally in scholarly books and journals and popular publications.
Aubrey Plourde, PhD Texas – Plourde is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Lynchburg, where she teaches on nineteenth-century British literature, children’s culture, and public humanities. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, and she was a member of the 2019 National Endowment for the Humanities seminar, “Religion, Secularism, and the Novel.” Her essays on secularism, religious belief, and interpretive practice in Victorian Britain have appeared in Victorian Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, Literature and Theology, and PMLA. She is currently working on her first book, “Recursive Hermeneutics and the Victorian Secular Imagination.”
Joe Ricke, PhD Rice – Ricke is an English Literature scholar, focusing on Medieval and Early Modern literature and its reception. Recent publications and lectures have included specific attention to MacDonald’s Shakespeare scholarship as well as a performance text of “The Light Princess” with the Adela Cathcart frame (with critical introduction). He has published numerous essays and book chapters on MacDonald, the Inklings, Medieval Drama, and Shakespeare, has edited three collections of essays and conference papers, and has co-edited the recent special issue on “Shakespeare and Cultural Apologetics” for An Unexpected Journal, which includes a section of MacDonald’s “St. George’s Day, 1564.” Forthcoming publications include an article on MacDonald’s Shakespeare scholarship in his late Victorian context and an edited version of MacDonald’s six-lectures series on Hamlet. Ricke is the founder and director of the Inkling Folk Fellowship, which meets weekly via Zoom.
Chelle Stearns, PhD St Andrews – Theologian and Musicologist, Stearns is the President of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music. She taught theology at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology for 15 years where she remains an Affiliate faculty member. Stearns is an author and active mentor to many artists and musicians. She also is a violinist who is active in orchestral and chamber music circles.
Jennifer Trafton, MA Gordon-Conwell – Trafton is an author and visual artist currently writing a commissioned book on the 19th-century painter, missionary, and social worker Lilias Trotter, who was deeply influenced by George MacDonald’s writings and mentored by Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Her graduate work at Duke focussed on MacDonald’s theology and literature. Trafton is the former editor of Christian History magazine, a creative writing teacher, and a regular speaker, editor, and writer for the Rabbit Room, a community of theologically-oriented artists based in Nashville, Tennessee. She has also written and co-written multiple chapters and books for children including The Rise & Fall of Mount Majestic, and recently illustrated the Advent companion Glad and Golden Hours (Rabbit Room Press, September 2024)
Amanda B. Vernon, PhD Lancaster – Teach@Tübingen Fellow at The University of Tübingen and Honorary Junior Fellow of the University of Buckingham, Vernon has also taught at Lancaster and Anglia Ruskin Universities. In 2019 she held a short-term fellowship at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, where she undertook work on the George MacDonald Collection at the Beinecke Library. Vernon’s research focuses on the relationship between literature and theology in the Victorian period. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Victorian Review, Among Winter Cranes, and Victorians. She is co-editor (with Daniel Gabelman) of Unsaying the Commonplace: George MacDonald and the Critique of Victorian Convention (2024) and is a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to George MacDonald (edited by Gabelman and Pazdziora). She is currently writing a monograph, Reading with the Trinity: Theology and Literary Form in George MacDonald (Manchester UP, 2026).
Brian A. Williams, DPhil Oxon - Williams is Dean of the Templeton Honors College, Associate Professor of Ethics & Liberal Arts, and Co-Director of the Master of Arts in Classical Teaching (MAT) at Eastern University (Philadelphia). He is the General Editor of Principia: A Journal of Classical Education and serves on the Academic Board of the Classic Learning Test (CLT), the Board of Advisors for the Classic Liberal Education Network (UK), and the National Board of the Alcuin Fellowship. He was Co-Director of 100 Days of Dante(Link is external) and Director of Oxford Conversations(Link is external). Dr. Williams also taught Theology, Philosophy, and Literature at Cair Paravel Latin School (Topeka, KS) and was Departmental Lecturer in Christian Ethics at the University of Oxford. Dr. Williams earned a B.A. in Biblical Literature (BBL), a MA and ThM in Theology from Regent College (Vancouver), and an MPhil and DPhil in Christian Ethics from the University of Oxford. His research examines education and formation in the tradition of Didascalic Christian Humanism, focusing on the works of Hugh of St. Victor, Philip Melanchthon, and John Henry Newman, among others.
Laurie Wilson, PhD St. Andrews - Wilson is an Associate Professor of Classics in the Torrey Honors College at Biola University, a great books program with a reading list that includes At the Back of the North Wind. She received her master’s degree in Greek and Latin and her doctoral degree in classics from the University of St. Andrews where she was an H.B. Earhart Foundation Fellow and a Postgraduate Fellow in the James Wilson Programme for Constitutional Studies. This background reflects her passion for classical reception studies and interdisciplinary research. Most recently, she has been working on connections between Stoic philosophers and the New Testament and on the influence of Virgil’s Aeneid in the writings of women authors from the Romantic period. Wilson is particularly interested in MacDonald’s theory of education and in his reception of classical authors.
Karl Persson, PhD University of B.C. - Persson is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, Canada. His areas of specialization are Medieval and Early Modern Literature, but he also has a more general interest in the literary reception of the Bible and theology. Recently, he has been doing increasingly more research on members of the Inklings and Inklings-adjacent authors, and he teaches courses on G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien. His most recent publication, “Grief as a Prophetic Voice Critiquing Eighteenth-Century Power-Knowledge in George MacDonald’s England’s Antiphon,” is available in Volume 42 of North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies.