Associate Professor Matthew Del Nevo
BA (AppSocSci) (Lancaster), BD (Sydney), GradDipRE (ACU), PhD (Sydney).
Biographical Information
Associate Professor Matthew Del Nevo works at the Catholic Institute of Sydney where he teaches Philosophy and Christian Spiritual Wisdom. He is interested in art and literature and poetry and psychoanalysis, spirituality and wisdom traditions. Matthew lectures on philosophy of psychology, philosophy of culture, philosophical anthropology, religion and modernity, historical philosophy and some analytic philosophy units. Matthew has a background in Spirituality and was Head of Spirituality at the Broken Bay Institute under Bishop David Walker as well as Dean of Research there for seven years, before coming to the Catholic Institute in 2009.
Research Interests
Associate Professor Del Nevo is a graduate of the University of Sydney. He has a post-graduate degree in Divinity and did an Honours research year in the History and Thought of Christianity with a thesis in patristics, and focus in Eastern Orthodox theology. Associate Professor Del Nevo’s PhD was in the post-Holocaust writings of the Egyptian-born Jewish French-cultured poet Edmond Jabès, and investigated questions of the absence of God and the spiritual effect and meaning of an event such as the Holocaust for God’s chosen people. The breathtaking beauty and wisdom of Jabès writing showed the redemptive power of writing, and Matthew’s work investigated the poetics of this creative achievement. The philosophies of Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida and Levinas went into this interpretative project, the best parts of which were published in Literature and Theology (Oxford) and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Major Publications
Associate Professor Del Nevo has written books on enchantment, melancholy, music, and a book of dense connected essays on psychology and religion in The Metaphysics of Night (2014), all these books published by Routledge since 2017.
He has been involved in the translation of works by Lou Andreas-Salomé, the first female psychoanalyst privately trained by Freud, who in another generation Nietzsche had fallen in love with, and who up until his death mentored the great lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke. His wide-ranging interests are integrated with this project.
Educationally, in terms of learning and teaching, Associate Professor Del Nevo is involved in Philosophy in Schools, which has to do with practicing philosophy in a facilitated group setting such that it enables the acquisition of analytical and synthetic thinking skills and informal logic. Matthew has published two educational resources to do with this available on www.philosophypathways.com .