David C. Mahan

Biography

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, and Christian poetics. His doctoral research at the University of Cambridge specifically 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 most recent work “Revised Versions: Poetry as Bible Reading” was published in Christianity and Literature in 2019. Most recently, he served as editor and published the Introduction to the Forum on Christian Poetics in the December 2022 issue of Christianity and Literature. 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 new Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts. He is a Fellow of Berkeley College, Yale, a long-time member of Yale Religious Ministries, and helps to coordinate numerous literary events and activities around the Yale campus.

Academic biography

Academic CV

Research topics

• Late-Modern Fiction & Poetry
• Literature & Theology
• Christian Poetics
• Literature of Trauma

Contributions to GlobalFacultyInitiative.net