A graduate of Yale Divinity School in religion and literature (1995) and winner of the Religion and the Arts Prize, Dr. Mahan has focused on the relationship between works of the literary imagination and the tasks of Christian theology, teaching classes that offer theological readings of 20th-21st century fiction and poetry, literature of trauma, apocalyptic fiction, and Christian poetics. His doctoral research at the University of Cambridge explored the connection between poetic form and the witnessing aims of a responsive theological discourse. He published his dissertation under the title “An Unexpected Light”: Theology and Witness in the Poetry and Thought of Charles Williams, Micheal O’Siadhail, and Geoffrey Hill (Princeton Monographs 2009). In addition to numerous papers and book reviews, his essay “‘A summons to try to look, to try to see’” appears as a chapter in the collection Musics of Belonging: The Poetry of Micheal O’Siadhail (2007). His article “Poetry and the Complexities of Remembrance: An Appeal,” appeared in the Autumn 2014 issue of Milin Havivin, and his essays “Revised Versions: Poetry as Bible Reading” was published in Christianity and Literature (Spring 2019), “The Wind’s Prayer, the World’s Sabbath: Spirit and Place in Lance Henson and Wendell Berry in Religions (Aug. 2021), and “Forum on Christian Poetics” in Christianity and Literature (December 2022). Having served as a campus minister at Yale since 1987, Dr. Mahan is currently the Executive Director of the Rivendell Institute at Yale, a Christian research and study center founded in 1995, where he also co-directs the Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts (RCTA). He is a Fellow of Berkeley College, Yale, a long-time member of Yale Religious Ministries and the longest-standing campus minister at Yale, and helps to coordinate numerous literary events and activities around the Yale campus and networks of scholars across the U.S. and U.K. See Dr. Mahan’s full CV.
B.A. Miami University of Ohio; M.A.R. Yale University; Ph.D. University of Cambridge