Nathan C. J. Hood

Hope Trust Postdoctoral Fellow

  • School of Divinity

Contact details

Biography

Background

Having grown up in Oxford and Birmingham, I moved to Edinburgh in 2012 to undertake an MA with Joint Honours in Philosophy and Theology, which I completed in 2016. The following academic year I completed an MTh in Theology in History at the University of Edinburgh. In 2017 I began a PhD in the History of Christianity. In August 2020 I was awarded a doctorate for my thesis '‘Let everyone examine themselves’: Radical Emotional Reflexivity in Scottish Reformed Protestantism, 1590-1640'. Currently, I am working as the Hope Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, a two year position.

Undergraduate teaching

Emotion, Spirituality, and Mysticism in Early Modern Christianity

Research summary

Early Modern Scottish Protestantism is the primary focus of my research. In particular, I am interetested in exploring how Scottish Protestants thought about and experienced their passions and affections in their religious piety. This involves exploring the language and concepts Scots used to categorise their psychosomatic experiences, analysing the affective dimension found in liturgical, autobiographical, and poetic texts, and exploring themes such as holy terror, assurance, mysticism, and self-examination.

Current research interests

Recently, my research has focussed upon the affective dimension of music in early modern Scottish Protestant. This topic has been explored in two directions. First, I have been engaging with the ways in which Scottish Protestants thought about and experienced psalm-singing, in public and private worship. Second, my work has interrogated the boundaries and ambiguous relationship between sacred and secular music in early modern Scotland, particularly in relation to religious education at a parish level.

This article was published on