'Contemplation: theory / practice' is an interdisciplinary research network, which for the academic year 2023-24 was based at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH). You can join our mailing list to keep up to date with future activities, or follow us on Twitter/X.

Network convenors: Dr Hannah Lucas & Tanya Kundu (Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge).

Contemplation is a wide-ranging term encompassing different meanings for different groups, and is adopted by this network as a touchstone for exploring a rich diversity of theories and practices united around a particular set of characteristics. These include (but are not limited to): the pursuit of altered states of consciousness, the cultivation of existential meaning, and attentional strategies deriving from both religious and non-religious contexts. Sessions will feature scholars and practitioners from a range of academic, spiritual, and artistic specialisms to discuss and explore these different contemplative modalities. Such specialisms may be drawn from the fields of theology, art history, literary studies, yoga studies, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, among others.

The network is intended as a forum to bring together the theoretical study of contemplation with its applications, spheres which have been historically divided. In recent decades, critical theorists have emphasised the importance of the experiential in academic work; a call to acknowledge the subjectivity of scholarship. In contemplative studies, this involves attending to the lived experiences of practitioners in addition to theorising contemplation’s phenomenology, cultural specificity, and scientific basis. This may involve conversations between scholars and practitioners, or indeed an integrated first-person approach to both. With this united focus, we can better understand the impacts of contemplation as, say, a wellbeing practice, or as a means to developing environmental or social consciousness. Reported impacts of sustained contemplative practice include increased attentional capacity, compassion, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence. But can and should such practices be removed from historical-cultural contexts and operationalised for widespread use? What are these histories, and how have we suppressed or denied them agency? And what are the practical, philosophical, and political implications of repurposing their ideas? These are but a few questions which animate discussions at the network’s events.

‘Contemplation: theory / practice’ is a space to reflect, imagine, and meditate on the ways humans connect with our minds and bodies. We intend for the network to be expansive: a space to think (and not think); a space to reinhabit and witness the self and its relation to the world. We hope for the discussions to be comparative, global, and inclusive, making room for traditions and voices historically elided by scholarship in the field. We seek to investigate contemplation as a living tradition, which grows and changes with time.

A day of practice-based workshops at Kettle's Yard, dedicated to different ways of contemplating the creative arts. Led by expert facilitators, artists, and academics.

Set in the inspiring surroundings of Kettle's Yard house and gallery, this one-day event brings together practitioners, artists, and academics to explore different ways of contemplating the creative arts.

The day will be comprised of an opening guided meditation session, followed by three practice-based workshops led by expert facilitators. Each workshop will offer an encounter with the creative arts—visual objects and art, music and sound, and words—encouraging participants to look, listen, and be with these forms with openness and attentive receptivity.

We hope that the day will inspire new connections and conversations about how we engage with the arts, who art is for, and how contemplative approaches—personal, communal, and pedagogical—might open new ways of seeing and acting in the world.

The event is free for all participants, with lunch, tea, and snacks provided at Kettle's Yard. A three-course dinner will conclude the day at Newnham College.

Read more here.

The Schedule

8:30-9:00 - Registration with Tea/Coffee

9:00-10:00 - Welcome and Guided Meditation

Led by the Rev. Takafumi Zenryu Kawakami (head priest of Shunkoin Temple Kyoto).

10:15-11:45 - Slow Looking: An encounter with objects and art from the Kettle's Yard collection.

Led by Jim Harris (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford) and Olivia Meehan (University of Melbourne).

12:00-13:00 - Lunch Break

13:00-14:30 - The Loudest Word Ever Screamed Was 'Quiet'!: An encounter with sound, music, and silence.

Led by Áron Birtalan.

14:30-15:00 - Tea/Coffee Break

15:00-16:30 - Writing the Body: An encounter with compositional practice, gesture, and poem.

Led by Bhanu Kapil (Churchill College, University of Cambridge) and Blue Pieta.

16:30-17:00 - Closing Remarks and Private Viewing

A chance for participants to enjoy a private viewing of the Kettle's Yard gallery.

19:00-21:30 - Dinner at Newnham College

The Facilitators

Reverend Takafumi Zenryu Kawakami is the 24th head priest at Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto, Japan. He travels the world leading global workshops on the topics of Zen, Buddhism, philosophy, the self and meditation at various companies and institutions such as MIT, Brown University, Eton College, Microsoft and Tedx. Read more.

Jim Harris is Teaching Curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, leading the Museum's academic engagement programmes across the curriculum of the University of Oxford. His research employs the technical examination of sculptural materials and surfaces, alongside archival work, to investigate issues of artistic and patronal intention and the shifting meanings of objects. Read more.

Olivia Meehan is an art historian and teaching specialist with a focus on slow looking and contemplative pedagogies. She is the Object-Based Learning Coordinator at the University of Melbourne, where she concentrates on discipline-led curriculum design to support visual intelligence, critical thinking, and communication skills. Read more.

Áron Birtalan is an artist, musician and a student of theology, whose work explores languages of intimacy between angel, creature and computer. They focus especially on theologies of touch, performance practice, lived spirituality, hospitality, bodies and unruly thought. Read more.

Bhanu Kapil is a poet and Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of six books: her most recent book, How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020), was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice. From 2000 to 2020, Kapil taught poetry, performance, fiction and contemplative practice seminars at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Read more.

Blue Pieta is an artist, dramaturg, theatre-director, and dancer exploring themes of mysticism, absurdism, and mythology, merging ancient storytelling practices with contemporary expression. They are dramaturg for Akram Khan Company’s production Thikra: Night of Remembering (2025) and the operetta Nine Songs directed by Farooq Chaudhry OBE with musical direction by Jocelyn Pook. Their art has been featured in exhibition programming by Serpentine Galleries, Courtauld Gallery, Britten Pears Arts, and staged at The Place, Battersea Arts Centre and Royal Court Theatre. Read more.

The Convenors

Hannah Lucas is the Newby Trust Research Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her research lies the intersection of literary history, theology, and philosophy—focused on contemplative texts and practices from around the globe, and the relationship between the medieval and the modern. Together with Tanya, she is the co-convenor of the research network, 'contemplation: theory / practice'. Read more.

Tanya Kundu is Research Associate in Theology at the University of Cambridge. Her research lies in the intersection of Christian Theology and queer and literary theory. She is interested in questions of theological use, method and normativity, and of articulating how the field of queer theology occupies a distinct philosophical niche. Together with Hannah, she is the co-convenor of the research network 'contemplation: theory / practice'. Read more.

Olivia Meehan is an art historian and teaching specialist with a focus on slow looking and contemplative pedagogies. She is the Object-Based Learning Coordinator at the University of Melbourne, where she concentrates on discipline-led curriculum design to support visual intelligence, critical thinking and communication skills. Read more.

You can read about the network's programme for 2023-24 on the CRASSH Blog here, including our reflections on each of the sessions.

Or see below for a full list of previous sessions.

From Cave to Clinic: Embracing Nuance and Interdisciplinarity in the Contemporary Study of Contemplative Practices

Julieta Galante (Contemplative Studies Centre, University of Melbourne)

3 April 2024 10:00-11:30

Session Description: One thing I have learned in my 15 years studying the effects of meditation practices on mental health, is that they do not work in the same way as pills, not even in the same way as physical exercise. These practices, even when done in remote caves, are socially constructed and historically situated. I will explain why I think that doctors such as myself need to resist the temptation to recommend mindfulness to everyone, and how entertaining nuance, doing interdisciplinary work, and involving communities in our research can deliver better results.

Academia, illness, and contemplation: living and working with Julian of Norwich

Claire Gilbert (University of Cambridge, former director, Westminster Abbey Institute)

12 Feb 2024 17:30 - 19:00

Session Description: In 2018 Claire Gilbert defended her thesis ‘Restoring Porosity and the Ecological Crisis: a post-Ricoeurian reading of the Julian of Norwich texts’ in which she argued that Julian’s writings can have a transformative effect on our subjectivity, changing it from the ‘buffered’ self that brought about the industrial revolution and the consequent damage to our environment, to a ‘porous’ self that is open to nature, sees our interdependence with it, and seeks to serve it rather than dominate and control.

In 2019 Claire was diagnosed with myeloma, a cancer of the blood.  During two and a half years of gruelling treatment, Julian changed from being the subject of her academic research to a spiritual companion and guide.  The transformation of self argued for in the thesis became a lived reality as Julian showed Claire how to face and forgive pain.

Claire published letters she wrote during her treatment in which she shared not only the pain of the treatment but also the ways in which Julian helped her, and the many unexpected joys that arose in that period of her life.  Contemplative practice was at its heart.

Claire will speak about her relationship with Julian and read from her cancer journal Miles to Go Before I Sleep, as well as I, Julian, her fictional autobiography written in homage to her.  Contemplation will form part of the session.

Contemplative practice and spiritual growth in prison

Selina Sasse (Director of The Prison Phoenix Trust)

26 Feb 2024 17:30 - 19:00

Session Description: The Prison Phoenix Trust has over 35 years’ experience in supporting the spiritual growth of those in prison, through sharing the contemplative practices of meditation, yoga, mindfulness and breathwork.  Testimonies of those whose lives have changed will illustrate the value and significance to rehabilitation.    The evidence includes evaluation of Prison Phoenix Trust programmes delivered in prison settings and the outcomes for participants.  By exploring the components of a prison mindfulness, meditation and yoga course and the crucial skills of its teachers, it is clear how essential personal silent breath-based contemplative practice  as a critical foundation to draw upon.  Selina’s reflections draw upon her personal experience of teaching prison groups, male, female and the youth estate and offering one to one guidance, through the work of the Trust.

Contemplative teaching and interreligious encounter; historical and contemporary perspectives

Rowan Williams (Formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, University of Cambridge)

29 Jan 2024 17:30 - 19:00

Session Description: Some discussion of interfaith discourse has tended to assume that there is a common phenomenon of ‘mystical experience’ to which appeal can be made in resolving supposed doctrinal/linguistic conflicts between traditions.  This is a simplistic model; but it does at least open up the question of how the specific disciplines of contemplation or meditation in different traditions speak to each other.  The aim is to look at a couple of instances of apparent encounter and interaction between traditions in the past, and to explore both the methodological and the theological issues arising today in this connection.

Becoming breath: semiogenesis, identity and contemplative praxis

Theo Wildcroft (SOAS) 

23 Oct 2023 17:30 - 19:00

Session Description: At the heart of most contemplative, body-based practices is a productive tension between receptivity and action, emergence and enactment. Contemplative practices are a practice of meaning-making: a search not just for a certain quality of experience, but for the experience of transcendent semiogenesis. We sit, we move, we breathe, not just with purpose, but with a point. We become, with every breath. In this session, I will draw on my own research, and the fields of dance, movement and meditation studies, to speak to a number of possibly insoluble but productive questions, asking what is at stake, what is recovered, and what is elided by the emerging narrative of the performed, perfected self in contemplative practice?

Colour, light and contemplation: Evelyn Underhill’s early encounters with the arts

Ayla Lepine (St James’s Piccadilly)

6 Nov 2023 17:30 - 19:00

Session Description: From 1898 to 1907, between the ages of 23 and 32, Evelyn Underhill travelled annually in France and Italy, making sketches and keeping a journal as she journeyed from place to place. These notebooks were published in 1949 with Longmans, Green and Co as Shrines and Cities of France and Italy: from an Early Diary of Evelyn Underhill.  The watercolours and drawings she produced accompanied her theologically-infused descriptions of the works of art and architecture she encountered, focusing especially on medieval sacred spaces and their effects on visitors and worshippers, from Chartres to St Mark’s in Venice. This paper will explore the ways in which Underhill’s engagement with the visual arts in Europe shaped her explorations of mysticism and contemplation within her early twentieth-century novels including The Grey World (her debut as a novelist, in 1904) as well as her breakthrough theological study, Mysticism (published in 1911). From an early age, Underhill had the heart and mind not only of a theologian, but also an art historian and artist.

Four elements: an invitation and creative workshop

Bhanu Kapil (Cambridge), Andrew Wille (Editor)

20 Nov 2023 17:30 - 19:00

Session Description: In this practice-based session introduced by Professor Bhanu Kapil, Andrew Wille will lead participants in a creative writing practice grounded in contemplative enquiry. Bhanu Kapil, a poet, will propose three essential questions drawn from contemplative art-making practices. Editor and writing teacher Andrew Wille will discuss the techniques of his “Four Elements” practice, which draws upon mindfulness training as well as the Tarot. Fire, Water, Earth and Air provide a simple yet powerful framework not only for creating new work but also for revising and editing. During this session, Andrew Wille will lead a short workshop. (Please bring something to write with/upon, or any work in progress you would like to look at again).