Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft hails from Bury in Greater Manchester, UK. She studied Theology and Religious Studies as an undergraduate at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, before moving to Corpus Christi College Cambridge for her doctoral research. In 2015, she took up a postdoctoral research fellowship at CRASSH, on the ERC-funded project ‘Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’, before returning to Sidney Sussex as a Research Fellow in Theology and Philosophy of Religion.
Ruth’s research sits at the intersection of theology, philosophy, literature, and intellectual history, and has focussed on late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century thought in particular. Her first academic monograph, The Veiled God: Friedrich Schleiermacher's Theology of Finitude reappraises the early work of the German theologian and philosopher, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834).
Her current research interests include hermeneutics, religious language, gender and epistemology. In 2023, Cambridge University Press published a book co-edited by her and Simon Goldhill, entitled Victorian Encounters with the Bible and Antiquity: The Shock of The Old.
Ruth is currently a Director of Studies for Theology, Religion and the Philosophy of Religion at Corpus Christi and Lucy Cavendish College. She is also a Senior Teaching Associate on the Cambridge Foundation Year, and Director of Studies for Foundation Year students at Sidney.
