Alexander J.B. Hampton

Associate Professor
Jackman Humanities Building, Room 303, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8
a.hampton@utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Global Christianities
  • Philosophy of Religion
  • Religion, Culture & Politics

Areas of Interest

  • Religion and the Environment
  • Religion and Literature and the Arts
  • History of the Philosophy of Religion

Biography

I received my PhD from the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge University in 2015 and then taught for two years at Barrett Honours College (Arizona State University), before moving to the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in 2017. Previously I earned an MPhil from Oxford in Philosophical Theology, an MA in Religious Studies from Stanford, and a BA in Literary Studies and Philosophy from the University of Toronto.

Research & Teaching 

In the study of religion my work falls under the three interrelated areas of philosophy, aesthetics and nature. My research examines how changes in metaphysics have influenced how human beings understand and interact with nature, how Platonic realism has shaped Western thought in both orthodox and heterodox ways, and how aesthetics has formed a language for expressing spirituality both inside and outside of traditions. I work with materials from antiquity to the present, with most of my publications focused upon the modern age, and particularly Romanticism. Details concerning my current research may be found here. 

I teach courses on the philosophy of religion, spirituality and nature, sacred and secular understandings of nature, and mysticism and literature. In these courses my students and I examine how meaning is made through philosophy, how spiritual affect is expressed in aesthetics, and how both are shaped in religion.

Areas of Research and Publicaton

Philosophy of religion: I focus upon the complex and creative relationship between Christianity and Platonism. This is explored in my most recent book, The Metaphysics of Divine Participation (Cambridge, 2025). It is also the subject of Christian Platonism: A History (Cambridge, 2021). I am the series editor for Cambridge Elements in the History of Philosophy and Theology, and the general editor for the five-volume History of Platonism in the Modern Age.

Religion and aesthetics: I concentrate upon the interaction between poetics, metaphysics and spirituality. This is the subject of my work on nature writing, mystical poetics, and Romanticism, Much of my work in this area examines the German Sattelzeit, the tempestuous and fecund period of transition from the early modern to the modern period. This research is published in numerous articles and the book Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion (Cambridge, 2019).

Religion and the environment: Encompassing both philosophy and aesthetics, my current work examines the entanglements between religion, nature and culture, as explored in the Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment (Cambridge, 2023) and Pandemic, Ecology and Theology (Routledge, 2020). This is the focus of my current project on Participation in Nature.

Publications

Books

  • Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism (Cambridge, 2019).
  • Pandemic, Ecology and Theology: Perspectives on COVID-19, ed. Alexander J. B Hampton (Routledge, 2020).
  • Christian Platonism: A History, ed. with John Peter Kenney (Cambridge, 2021).
  • Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment, ed. with Douglas Hedley (Cambridge, 2022). 
  • Transzendenz für ein Zeitalter der Immanenz: Die romantische Neuerfindung der Religion (Metzler, 2023).
  • Friedrich Jacobi and the End of the Enlightenment: Religion, Philosophy, and Reason at the Crux of Modernity (Cambridge, 2023). 
  • The Metaphysics of Divine Participation (Cambridge, 2025).

Selected Articles and Chapters

  • ‘The Poetics of Nature: Human-Nature Dialogue in the Thought of Novalis’, Living Ideas: Matter and Life in Coleridge, Schelling, and Other Dynamical Idealists. ed. Peter Cheney (London: Springer, 2025), 89-104. 
  • ‘Romanticism and System in Coleridge and Schlegel’, Symphilosophie, 5 (2023), pp. 265-99.
  • Theological Poetics in Jacopone da Todi’, Iacopone da Todi: The Power of Dissent and the Originality of Franciscan Poetry, eds. Matteo Leonardi, Alessandro Vettori (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
  • ‘The Role of Plotinus in the Romantic Philosophy of Novalis: Transcending Fichte and Spinoza’, International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 2022, 1-24.
  • ‘Pandemic and the Nature-Alienated Self in the Contemporary Social Imaginary’, Religions, 2022, 13(7), n. 575.
  • ‘Nature and Aesthetics: Methexis, Mimesis and Poiesis’, Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment, eds. Alexander J.B. Hampton, Douglas Hedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 263-85.
  • ‘Jacobi and the Romantics’, Friedrich Jacobi and the End of the Enlightenment: Religion, Philosophy, and Reason at the Crux of Modernity, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming 2023. 
  • ‘Platonism, Nature and Environmental Crisis’, Christian Platonism: A History, ed. Alexander J. B. Hampton, John Kenney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 381-407. 
  • ‘The Poetics of Mysticism’, ed. Edward Howells and Mark McIntosh, The Oxford Handbook to Mystical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 241-64. 
  • ‘Romantic Religion: Dissolution and Transcendence in the Poetics of Ho¨lderlin’, Symphilosophie 1 (2019), pp. 61-74. 
  • ‘Nature’s Beauty: Legitimacy, Imagination and Transcendence in Hepburn and the New Nature Writing’, Journal of Scottish Thought, 11 (2019), 113-126.
  • ‘Transcendence and Immanence: Deciphering Their Relation through the Transcendentals in Aquinas and Kant’, Toronto Journal of Theology, 34 (2018), pp. 187-198.
  • ‘A Post-Secular Nature and the New Nature Writing’, Christianity and Literature, 67 (2018), pp. 454-471. 
  • ‘An English Source of German Romanticism: Herder’s Cudworth Inspired Revision of Spinoza from “Plastik’”to “Kraft’”, The Heythrop Journal, 58 (2017), pp. 417-431. 
  • ‘Herder’s Concept of Being and the Influence of Kant’s Pre-Critical Consideration of the Ontological Argument’, Filozofia, 70 (2015), pp. 842-52.
  • ‘Reception, Religion and the Problem of Subjectivity in Early German Romanticism’, Journal for the History of Modern Theology/Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte, 22 (2015), pp. 35-58. 
  • ‘The Aesthetic Foundations of Romantic Mythology’, Journal for the History of Modern Theology/Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte, 20 (2014), pp. 175-91. 

Selected Grants and Awards

  • Insight Development Grant, ‘Participation in Nature: Metaphysics, Ecology, and the Environment’, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2023-2026.
  • Experiential Learning Faculty Fellows Program, Faculty of Arts & Science, University of Toronto, 2023-2025.
  • Global Classrooms Grant, ‘Global Perspectives on Religion and Ecology’, University of Toronto, 2021.
  • Program for the Arts, ‘The Pleasure of the Dawn Chorus: Conserving the Pandemic Soundscape’, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto, 2021.
  • Connections Grant, ‘Religion, Nature and the Environment in the West’, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2020.
  • Insight Development Grant, ‘Romantic Ecology’, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2020-2024.
  • Netzwerk Deutsch Grant, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, ‘Jacobi: A Bicentenary Reconsideration’, 2019.
  • Connections Grant, ‘Christian Platonism: Concepts, History and Contemporary Questions’, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2018.
  • Insight Development Grant, ‘The Transcendence of Nature’, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2018-2022.

Media and Public Engagement

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