[Joshua is away from Cambridge for the academic year 2024-25].

Joshua Heath’s research spans Christian theology, philosophy and literary studies. He has a particular interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian religious thought, and especially in the Russian ‘linguistic turn’ of the early twentieth century, which began as a dispute concerning the Name of God, but quickly animated literary and artistic conversations about the nature of art and symbol. The focus of his research to date has been Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1944), a key contributor to these debates and an increasingly dominant figure in Christian theology.

Heath’s works stands within the latest developments of the ‘Cambridge School’ of philosophical theology, with its simultaneous attention to metaphysics, language and aesthetics. In dialogue with Russian religious thought, as well as contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of language, his publications explore the relationship between language and reality, and the nature of artistic, or symbolic activity.

Within Slavonic Studies, he lectures on SL14 (‘Russian Culture from 1895 to the Death of Stalin’). Within the Faculty of Divinity, he teaches the MPhil module ‘Sergii Bulgakov: Speculation and Subjectivity’. He supervises postgraduate work in Russian literature, as well as twentieth-century theology.