HMC elects new Wills Fellow and Tutor in Theology and Religion

Dr Bethany Sollereder

Harris Manchester College is delighted to announce the election of a new Fellow and Tutor. Dr Bethany Sollereder, who is currently Lecturer in Science and Religion at the University of Edinburgh, will join the College in September as its new Wills Fellow and Tutor in Theology and Religion, a post endowed by the Wills Trust.

As well as acting as the College’s general theology and religion tutor, Dr Sollereder will take up the position of Associate Professor in Science and Religion in the University’s Faculty of Theology and Religion.

Dr Sollereder’s research specialises in theology concerning evolution and suffering, and her current work focuses on the theological possibilities and human vocation in response to ecological decline. Her publications include God, Evolution and Animal Suffering: Theodicy without a Fall (2018), Why is There Suffering? Pick Your Own Theological Adventure (2021), as well as the co-edited volume Progress in Theology: Does the Queen of the Sciences Advance? published this year.

Dr Sollereder commented: “I am thrilled to be returning to Oxford, where I pursued post-doctoral work prior to Edinburgh, and am honoured now to join the HMC community as a Fellow. I have spent many happy hours in the Harris Manchester archives and teaching graduate seminars in the Charles Wellbeloved room, and look forward to being part of the College.”

HMC Principal Jane Shaw said of Dr Sollereder’s appointment: “We are delighted to welcome Dr Sollereder to HMC as the Wills Fellow In Theology and Religion. The focus of her research, in science and religion, has a long and distinguished history at the college, from the eighteenth century when the pioneering chemist Joseph Priestley was a tutor, to the 1960s when the zoologist Alister Hardy founded his research centre on religious experience at the college, to the 1990s when the Idreos Professorship in Science and Religion was established.”