Front Quad of Lincoln College, the walls covered in bright green ivy

Rev Dr Andrew Shamel

Chaplain
Career Development Fellow

Profile

I studied English Literature at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, before training for ordination in the Episcopal Church at Church Divinity School of the Pacific and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. I am presently in the final stages of my DPhil in Theology at Oxford.

Before coming to Oxford, I served as the Episcopal Chaplain to Stanford, where I collaborated with Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and secular humanist groups to support students, faculty, and staff.

Research: I study the intersections of theological discourse and narrative. I am interested in how we encounter the world and the self as meaningful and how we engage in imaginative poiesis to effect that encounter. My doctoral thesis develops a Christian participatory account of mythopoiesis, engaging critically and creatively with theologies of culture (Ward, Milbank, Keller, Balthasar, Bultmann) and with contemporary fantasy fiction (Pratchett, Le Guin, Tolkien) as a site of post-Christian myth-making.