New Faculty Member: Dr. Cindy Aalders
Regent College is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Cindy Aalders as Director of the John Richard Allison Library and as Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity, effective May 1, 2018.
This appointment, which comes with the full endorsement of the Regent Faculty and of the Board of Governors, recognizes Cindy’s exceptional professional acumen in addition to her standing as an academic historian in her own right.
Announcing the appointment, Academic Dean Paul Spilsbury commented, “We have been very impressed by Cindy’s excellent work as Acting Director of the Library and we are thrilled to welcome her onto the team as full-time faculty. We know Regent will benefit greatly from her brilliance as a historian and teacher, as well as her continued dedication to our library.”
Cindy earned an MCS in Spiritual Theology from Regent College in 2002, a ThM in Spiritual Theology in 2007, and her PhD in History from the University of Oxford in 2014. Her research there focused on the spiritual lives and manuscript cultures of eighteenth-century British women, and her book on this topic is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, she is the author of To Express the Ineffable: The Hymns and Spirituality of Anne Steele (Paternoster, 2008).
Cindy has been the Acting Library Director of the John Richard Allison Library since 2016. During this time she has steered a clear and steady course through complex process of Carey Theological College’s separation from the Allison Library partnership and overseen a substantive library system migration. She also supervises the library’s collection of rare Puritan books, and is currently organizing a library-hosted conference to take place in July 2018, “Uncommon Devotion: Reflections on Puritan Texts.” Cindy has taught at Oxford and Regent in the areas of History and Spirituality, supervises theses and comprehensive exams at Regent, leads a seminar for thesis students, and is a valued mentor to students.
When not in the library or classroom, Cindy loves to . . . well, read, drink good coffee, enjoy dear friends, and watch for those first signs of spring.