Alan Jacobs, Ph.D.

Education

• Ph.D., University of Virginia (1987)
• B.A., University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa (1980)

Biography

Dr. Alan Jacobs is The Jim and Sharon Harrod Endowed Chair of Christian Thought and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University. He began teaching at Baylor in 2013 and is a Resident Fellow of Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion. Prior to his time at Baylor, Dr. Jacobs taught at Wheaton College in Illinois for twenty-nine years. He earned a B.A. from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Dr. Jacobs is the author of many books including, most recently, How To Think and The Year of Our Lord 1943. His next book is called Breaking Bread with the Dead: The Case for Temporal Bandwidth (Penguin Press). More information about his research interests and writing may be found here: visit his website.

Academic Interests and Research

• Modern British and British Commonwealth literature
• Christian Theology and Literature
• Literature and Religion
• Literary Theory and the History of Criticism
• Technologies of Reading, Writing and Research

Professional Awards/Activities/Grants and Fellowships

• Visiting Writer, Seattle Pacific University MFA Program in Creative Writing (2009)
• Visiting professor, Regent College Graduate School, Vancouver, British Columbia, (Summer 2006)
• Visiting professor, Evangelical Churches of West Africa (ECWA) Seminary, Igbaja, Kwara State, Nigeria (Summer 1991).
• Coordinator, Wheaton College Faculty Faith and Learning Program (1999-2006)
• Director, Wheaton-in-England (summer study abroad program) 2000 and 1996
• Co-director, Wheaton-in-England 2011 and 1994.

Selected Books

• The Year of Our Lord 1943 (Oxford, 2018)
• How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (Currency, 2017)
• “The Book of Common Prayer:" A Biography (Princeton, 2013)
• A critical edition of W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (Princeton, 2013)
• A critical edition of W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Princeton, 2011)
• The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford, 2011)
• Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant (Eerdmans, 2010)
• Original Sin: A Cultural History (HarperOne, 2008)
• Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Eerdmans, 2008)
• The Narnian: The Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Harper, 2005)
• Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truth-Telling (Eerdmans, 2004)
• Must Christianity Be Violent? Reflections on History, Practice, and Theology (Brazos Press, 2003)
• A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Westview Press, 2001)
• A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age (Brazos Press, 2001)
• What Become of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry (University of Arkansas, 1998)

Recent Essays

• “Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future” in The Hedgehog Review
• “Outside In” in Comment
• “Ecclesial Plurality” in Pro Ecclesia
• “Wokeness and Myth on Campus” in The New Atlantis
• “Filth Therapy: A Cunning Word” in Comment
• “Automata, Animal-Machines, and Us” in Education & Culture
• “When Character No Longer Counts” in National Affairs
• “The Witness of Literature: A Genealogical Sketch” in The Hedgehog Review
• “The Watchmen: What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?” in Harper's
• “Renewing the University” in National Affairs
• “The Benedict Option and the Way of Exchange” in First Things
• “The Centrifugal Experience of Knowledge” in Books & Culture
• “Habits of Mind in an Age of Distraction” in Comment
• “Attending to Technology: Theses for Disputation” in The New Atlantis
• “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity” in The New Atlantis
• “Murder in Paradise” in The American Conservative