Dr Rebekah Wallace is an Early Career Development Fellow in Theology, Philosophy, and the Arts. Her research interests include embodiment, especially as it relates to embodied cognition and perception, and the metaphysics of mind. Her current research is at the intersection of embodied cognition and the arts. She is especially interested in how art forms such as poetry and music might mediate and sculpt our perception of reality. This includes perception of non-material and spiritual realities in both the participation in, and practice of, artistic creation. Drawing on enactive forms of cognition which claim perception is an activity, she believes this account of perception, agency, and creation has interesting implications for ethics and moral action.

Before her appointment at King's, Rebekah was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford where she completed her Master's then DPhil in Theology, focusing on Science and Religion. Her research area covered embodied cognition and neo-Aristotelian/Thomist anthropologies of the mind and soul, arguing for parallels between more ancient traditions and recent discoveries in the cognitive sciences.

Research interests

• Theology, Philosophy, and the Arts
• Embodied and Enactive Cognition
• Metaphysics of Mind

Teaching

Rebekah Wallace teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules relating to Theology, Philosophy, and the Arts.

Selected publications

Flesh and Form: Embodied Cognition and the Person as Process. Routledge. (Forthcoming)

“Legacy of the Angels.” Aeon, March 2025.

“Does Embodied Cognition Support a Hylomorphic View of the Soul?” Theological Puzzles (Issue 9). 2022. https://www.theo-puzzles.ac.uk/2022/06/19/wallace/.

“A Plea for Embodied Spirituality: The Role of the Body in Religion by F. Watts (2021): Reviewed by Rebekah Wallace.” Body and Religion, 5(1), 116–120. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.22544

“The Wholeness of Humanity: Coleridge, Cognition, and Holistic Perception.” Zygon. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12792