Joint appointment for Sacred Traditions and Liberal Arts
King’s College London has appointed Dr Aaron Rosen as its first Lecturer in Sacred Traditions and the Arts, based in the Department of Theology & Religious Studies. This is a joint first for the School of Arts & Humanities as Dr Rosen will also serve as the inaugural programme convenor of the new BA Liberal Arts programme, which will commence in September 2012.
Dr Rosen comes to King’s from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University. He earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has been a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley and a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University. He has taught courses on subjects ranging from Christian art to modern Jewish philosophy to the graphic novel. He has a special interest in the work of Chagall, the Abstract Expressionists, and School of London painters such as Freud, Auerbach, and Kitaj.
Dr Rosen says, “I am delighted to be the new (and first!) Lecturer in Sacred Traditions and the Arts at King’s College London, which means I never have to choose between the two subjects that interest me the most: art and religion. I love that the BA in Liberal Arts will allow students similar freedom to pursue their own assorted passions without giving up a subject simply because it falls outside a given box.”
Beginning in September 2012, the BA Liberal Arts is a flexible, interdisciplinary and innovative programme that enables students to tailor their degree from a wide range of options in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Students will study a broad range of options in their first year, before choosing a major, allowing them to build a programme around their own interests in years two and three.
Dr Rosen has published articles and reviews on religion and the arts in publications including 'Jewish Quarterly', 'Art and Christianity', 'Religion and the Arts', and the 'Journal of Jewish Studies'. His first book, 'Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj' (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), looked at how Jewish painters have made use of a non-Jewish visual heritage in ways which shed light on these artists’ own identities and also help reframe wider problems for contemporary Jewish thought. He is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled 'The Art of Interfaith Dialogue: What Jews and Christians Can Learn from Looking at Art'.