Joshua Furnal (Ph.D. Durham) has been appointed Lecturer of Systematic Theology at St. Patrick's Pontifical University, Maynooth.

He is an Associate Editor of Brill Research Perspectives in Theological Traditions and the co-editor of the Contributions to Philosophical Theology series. Recently, he has been the recipient of four visiting research fellowships: the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (Italy), the Hong Kierkegaard Library (USA), Gladstone’s Library (UK), and the National Institute for Newman Studies (USA).

Before coming to Maynooth, he held a tenure-track teaching and research position at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Prior to Nijmegen, he held postdoctoral positions as a Visiting Research Fellow with the Leslie Center for Humanities and a Lecturer in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. Also, he has been a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Tübingen, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Durham University (UK) in the Department of Theology and Religion.

His primary area of expertise is the history of modern Christian theology and philosophical theology from the 20th century to the present. He has published on a variety of topics including the philosophical theology of Søren Kierkegaard, the Thomist philosopher Cornelio Fabro, and 'ressourcement' theologians in relation to Vatican II. His first monograph, Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press 2016) discovered that Kierkegaard’s writings had a surprising impact on influential Catholic thinkers during the twentieth century.

His current academic research focuses on the legacy of the influential Italian Thomist philosopher, Fr. Cornelio Fabro CSS (1911-1995) who was also one of the most important European interpreters of Kierkegaard in the twentieth century. His next monograph is provisionally entitled 'Being before God: Cornelio Fabro’s Thomistic approach to Kierkegaard’s Theology', which presents the first systematic treatment of Fabro’s interpretation of Kierkegaard and explores the dialectical relation of faith and reason, and the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in Kierkegaard’s philosophical theology.