My three-fold vocation is expressed through scholarship that explores the sacred story, as we encounter and make meaning of it through storytelling, or Embodied Performance.
I also study story and storytelling more generally, and the broader art and craft of oral communication. I am connected with scholarly communities as Adjunct Faculty at Uniting College for Leadership and Theology / University of Divinity, and as a member of the Network of Biblical Storytellers’ Scholars Seminar.
Scholarly Publications
Embodied Performance. Mutuality, Embrace, and the Letter to Rome
2020, Pickwick Publications.
“Agnew has not just laid out a new method of textual analysis. In this book, she argues for a mode of interpretation that understands what happens when you draw us all in, text and performers and audience, grandmothers and grandchildren, even insiders and outsiders to the community of faith.
Biblical Performance Criticism creates a space within which we all are partners in making and exploring meaning. This book can transform your understanding of that whole process.
We are all in this together, and Sarah Agnew has handed us a powerfully insightful way of understanding our mutual work. For that, I am deeply thankful to her.”
Richard W. Swanson, Foreword
Testimonials
the best survey and critical assessment of the development of performance criticism I have seen
a highly engaging and personal story of discovery of importance to anyone who takes the Bible seriously and wants to understand it better.
Sarah Agnew uncovers a performance space filled with mutual interactions that can be studied using social scientific methods
Sarah Agnew offers us a method that will transform both biblical scholarship and congregational audiences.
[Sarah’s] perspective as performer-interpreter and her development of ‘Embodied Performance Analysis’ offers significant insights for biblical scholars and church people alike.
This book argues for a mode of interpretation that understands what happens when you draw us all in, text and performers and audience, grandmothers and grandchildren, even insiders and outsiders to the community of faith.
In this pioneering and multifaceted book, Sarah Agnew has developed an embodied performance methodology that builds on the foundations laid by biblical performance criticism in new and highly creative ways.
Journal articles
“Romans 16:
A call to embrace one another in love”
Oral History Journal of South Africa, 5(2), 2017.
‘Ill-treated traditions.
Two lecterns lament, then offer hope to their speakers.’
Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal, 1(4) Winter, 20–31, 2017.
‘“Whispered in the Sound of Silence”
Traumatising the Book of Jonah’
(Second author with Elizabeth Boase)
The Bible and Critical Theory, 12(1), 2016, 4–22, 2016.
Book Chapter
‘Choice: Story. Reception Theory and Storytelling: Choosing Stories to Tell and Ways to Tell Them.’
Lena Moller, Minerva Ahumada and Laurinda Brown (Eds) Perspectives in Storytelling. Framing Global and Personal Identities,
Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014.
Web articles
‘The Beginning of the New Testament: oral, written, or both?’
Centre for the Study of Christian Origins, New College, University of Edinburgh, 6 October 2016.
Conference presentations
‘Love and honour as an invitation to ‘glorify’ God?
Embodying and performing the Great Command with the letter to the Romans’.
Exploring the Glory of God, Durham, 6–9 July 2016
‘Let the children come: Inviting humans to the Word in all their fullness’.
Postgraduate Conference, New College, University of Edinburgh, March 2015
‘A story about grace’
TEDxAdelaide ‘Explore’ 4 May 2013
‘God’s Story: Ours for the Telling’
Keynote addresses, Network of Biblical Storytellers International Festival Gathering, 2020.