Biography
Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Ph.D., Marquette University) is Professor of Theology and Literature at Wheaton College, Editor of The Coleridge Bulletin, and a writer on British Romanticism, religion and literature, and the history of Christian thought.
I was born and raised in the Hudson Valley of New York, a region best known for pastoral landscapes memorialized by early American painters such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. Early in my education, I wondered how religion and literature might provide mutually enriching sources for theological reflection. This intuition led me to graduate studies in both English literature and theology, where the poetry and philosophical theology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge provided a crucial nexus for my professional life. At Wheaton College, I teach courses in historical and systematic theology and research the historical and religious context of British literature from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.
In addition to serving as an officer for The Friends of Coleridge and editor of a scholarly journal, I have written four books, edited an expansive anthology of Romantic-era literature, and edited five other essay collections. Recent publications include The Last Romantic: C. S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology (2025), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion (2021), The Spirit of Methodism: From the Wesleys to a Global Communion (2019), Religion in Romantic England (2018), and Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought (2014), which was praised in the Times Literary Supplement:"Sara Coleridge emerges from these pages as an intellectually formidable, powerfully compassionate and rigorously scholarly figure who bore the many difficulties of her life with profound nobility."
My work has appeared in more than thirty articles and essays, along with some fifty book reviews, in publications such as the Journal of Religion, Methodist Review: A Journal of Wesleyan and Methodist Studies, Anglican Theological Review, Heythrop Journal, VII: The Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center, European Romantic Review, Journal of Church and State, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and The Wordsworth Circle.
