Activities
Thomistic Studies
Prof. Corbett is the co-founder and director of CEPHAS, a Thomistic Centre for Philosophy and Scholastic Theology.
Since 2012, he has been leading summer courses for interested members of the public, most recently (2025) with the topic ‘“What is God?”: Philosophical, Christian, and Islamic Approaches’.
Prof. Corbett has also given talks and retreats for the Thomistic Institute, and he helped to establish a TI chapter at the University of St Andrews. Previous talks for the TI have included: “A Thomistic Approach to the Good Life”; “Aquinas: A Model of Holiness for Students”; “Music in the Catholic Tradition”; “Dante’s Beatrice and the Beauty of the Christian Faith”; “Passionate Intellects: Aquinas, Dante, and the Love of Wisdom”,’ “The Myth of Dante’s Thomism? Reading Aquinas and Dante with the Dominicans”, as well as an ‘Off-Campus Conversation” with Fr Gregory Pine “Aquinas on Beauty, Art, & Wisdom”.
In 2026, Prof. Corbett will give the annual ‘St Thomas Aquinas Lecture’ at the Dominican House of Studies, Washington, as well as the annual ‘Aquinas Lecture’ at the University of Bristol.
Dante Studies
Prof. Corbett co-directed, with Prof. Heather Webb, Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy (2012-2016), an international and interdisciplinary reappraisal of the whole poem, published in 3 volumes (2015-2017).
He worked, with Dr Patricia Kelly, on a new translation and edition of Pierre Mandonnet’s Dante le théologien, as part of a broader collaboration with the Leeds Dante Centre reappraising the figure of Dante’s Beatrice.
He was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2023 for a research project entitled “Theologian-Poet: Dante’s Beatrice, and the Beauty of the Christian Faith‘, retrieving the sophisticated theological readings of Dante’s three autobiographical works, the Vita nuova, the Convivio, and the Commedia, by principally Catholic and clerical scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2024, he gave the Annual Dante Lecture at the University of Toronto, with the title “Dante and Beatrice”.
He is currently collaborating with colleagues Theodore J. Cachey, Vittorio Montemaggi, and Jennifer Newsome Martin in the University of Notre Dame on a research project – Dante Among Theologians – to build on the scholarly investigation of Dante and Theology, and to develop a more programmatic historical retrieval of the theological reception of Dante over the past 700 years. For the ‘soft launch’ of this research programme, see here.
Theology and the Arts
In 2016, he founded TheoArtistry, a project bringing together theologians and artists in creative collaboration, and which has led to a number of projects, including the TheoArtistry Composers’ Scheme (2016-2018), the TheoArtistry Poets’ Scheme (2018-2019), ‘Creatively Theological’ (2018-2019), and the ‘TheoArtistry Text & Image Scheme’ (2021), as well as an international festival, a number of art exhibitions, related publications (including Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century), a CD recording, and a volume of poetry.
Sacred Music
Building on the success of the TheoArtistry Composers’ Scheme, Prof. Corbett established, with Dr Michael Ferguson and other colleagues in Divinity and Music, a permanent collaboration on a new MLitt in Sacred Music, which launched in the 2020-2021 academic year.
Prof Corbett has worked closely with the renowned composer Sir James MacMillan (Professor of Theology and Music in ITIA) on projects bringing theologians and composers together, as well as in championing the role of faith in music, taking part, for example, in a series of discussions with MacMillan about the relationship between music and transcendence, for Closer to Truth, and participating in MacMillan’s pioneering series ‘Faith in Music‘ for BBC Radio 4.
Prof. Corbett was also Principal Investigator of a research project Music and Spiritual Realities 2022-2023 (funded by the Templeton Religion Trust). With his co-investigator Dr Sarah Moerman, Prof. Corbett brought together scholars in different fields – including theology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience – to interrogate the commonly-perceived relationship between music and spirituality. This led to the collaborative volume Music and Spirituality: Theological Approaches, Empirical Methods, and Christian Worship (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2024).