Tamara Abrossimova (St Petersburg) is an actress, taught in Moscow in the Stanislavskian tradition. For much of her career she has been based at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre in St Petersburg, but her work has also embraced the world of cinema. Her most recent work has been a solo performance, O zhizni, smerti I lyubvi (‘About Life, death and love’), which has toured Russia. The performance dramatizes three stories by Bunin, Chekhov and Leskov. 

Mikhail Anikiev (St Petersburg) was educated at St Petersburg State University. He is a scholar of medieval French history. His book Chronicles and Documents from the Epoch of the Hundred Years War, contains his translation into Russian of many important primary sources. It was published in 2005. The main focus of his present research is on the Chronicles of Jean Froissart.

Catriona Bass (Oxford) is a scholar of Tibetan and Russian history. She has taught at Hubei University in Wuhan and in the 1980s worked for the Lhasa City Government Education Department and the TAR Academy of Social Sciences.  She has addressed the European Parliament and the United Nations on educational development  in the TAR. She has published Inside the Treasure House: A Time in Tibet (Victor Gollancz, 1990) and Education in Tibet : Policy and practice since 1950 (Zondervan, 1998). She is writing a biography of the city of St Petersburg.

Edson Burton (Bristol) is a scholar of Black History in modern Britain and the Caribbean. His doctorate at the University of the West of England was a study of Black Christianity and the Church of England, 1948-1980. He has worked as a librarian at a community library in the St Paul’s district of Bristol and now directs an inter-faith forum there. He also runs the city’s annual Black History Month. With the historian William Ackah he is presently beginning work on a new Black History Yearbook, which will offer a regular scholarly home to scholars of Black history writing across the world.

Selma Catic (Mostar) grew up in Bosnia but lived in London between 1992 and 1998. Thereafter, she studied and taught flute at the Music College at Mostar and worked for a number of humanitarian organizations involved in relief work there. From 2002 she worked as a supervisor of the music schools set up by the Pavarotti Centre, developing her own ideas for the musical education of children across the Mostar region. She plays with the Mostar Sinfonietta.

Xenia Dennen (London) is a specialist in Russian affairs. For many years she worked on behalf of the Keston Institute, Oxford, editing its journal Religion in Communist Lands. Now she is the Chair of the organization. She has played a leading part in Keston’s new Encyclopaedia of Religion in Contemporary Russia, travelling throughout the Russian Federation for material of all kinds. She is currently writing a study of nineteenth-century Russian conservative and liberal political thought, focusing on the work of Pyotr Vyazemsky.

Mohamed El Djalil Kadi-Hanifi (Valencia) was born and educated in Algeria. Today he lives and works in Spain, teaching in a secondary school and maintaining his own commitment to the world of science with a theoretical physics group at the University of Valencia. His autobiographical study of the state of higher education in Algeria was published in Humanitas Vol. 7 no. 2 (April 2006).

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Oronto Douglas (Port Harcourt) is a lawyer whose work has specialised in the civil education of the Ogoni people in Nigeria. He was a founding member of Environmental Rights Action, which is affiliated to Friends of the Earth in Nigeria. With Ike Okonta he has written Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights in Oil in the Niger Delta (Random House, 2001; Verso 2003). He is presently working to build a legal practice in Nigeria.

Juliana Dresvina (Moscow and Cambridge) is a scholar of late medieval English mysticism. Currently she is completing her post-graduate research at the universities of Moscow and Cambridge, examining the cult of St Margaret of Antioch in medieval England. She is publishing the first Russian translation of two important fifteenth century works, the Book of Margery Kempe and the Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich.

John Edwards (Oxford) was formerly Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and reader in Spanish History at the university of Birmingham. He is currently a Research Fellow in Spanish at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Correspondent of the Spanish Royal Academy of History. He has written extensively on Spanish History, including The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474-1520 (2000), The Spanish Inquisition (Tempus, 1999) and Ferdinand and Isabella (Longman, 2005).


Frank Field (London) as well as being a Member of Parliament for Birkenhead he also seeks to develop national social policy.  His present concerns embrace welfare reform, including pension reform, and the decline of social behaviour in contemporary Britain.  His belief that political institutions must move welfare to a contractual basis so that people expect what behaviour is required from them in return for society's financial commitment to them has attracted widespread interest.  His many publications include Reforming Welfare (Social market Foundation, London, 1997) and Neighbours from Hell: the Politics of Behaviour.


Kanjickal John Gabriel (Kottayam) studied English literature at Basalios College, Kottayam and theology at the Orthodox seminary, Kottayam, graduating from the university of Serampore.  He studied for his M.Th. in New Testament Studies from Catholic University at Paris and went from here to research the Pauline epistles at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and, after completing his doctorate at Serampore, Cambridge University. After ordination he served as Vicar of various parishes in Bombay, Delhi, Kottayam and Trivandrum. From 1982 onwards he was Professor of New Testament in Orthodox Theological Seminary, Kottayam. He has worked to foster a new tradition of feminist theology within the educational institutions of the South Indian church, and had himself written extensively on Syrian Orthodox theology and history.

Anthony Harvey (Oxford), now retired, was Lecturer in Theology and Fellow of Wolfson College and Chaplain of The Queen’s College, Oxford before he became Sub-Dean of Westminster. His published works have mainly been in New Testament studies and Christian ethics. His books include Strenuous Commands: the Ethic of Jesus (1982, 2nd edition 2004), Demanding Peace; Christian Responses to War and Violence (SCM, 1999) By What  Authority? The Churches and Social Concern (SCM, 2001) and A Companion to the New Testament (2nd edition, CUP, 2004)

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E.C. John (Bangalore) was professor of Old Testament studies and Principal of the United Theological College, Bangalore. He is the general editor of a major new Bible Dictionary, the first such work to be published in Malayalam, and a succession of studies of Christian mission history. With his wife, Juliane H. John he published Resistance, Protest and Witness during the Third Reich (Bangalore, 1999). He is currently working in the history of Christian missions in nineteenth-century India.

Jose M. John (Kottayam), is a scholar of sociology who studied at the Annamalai University before dedicating himself to social education work among the Dalit villages of the state of Kerala, South India. His particular commitments lie in the provision of educational facilities for children and women, and he is very much involved in various social improvement campaigns across the south of India. He is the co-founder of the DAWN trust at Mavady, an organization dedicated to fostering women’s social and educational rights in his region, and an active participant in various Dalit organizations nationwide.

Mercy K. John (Kottayam),  studied history at the Mahatma Gandhi University  and theology at Kerala United Theological Seminary at Trivandrum before taking her Master’s degree in new Testament studies from Serampore University while at Kottayam. Her current research explores the place of women in the early Christian Church. Her book The Dignity of Women in Paul’s Letters was published by Christava  Sahitya Samithi, Tiruvalla, in 2001.

Irina Kukota (Moscow and Oxford) was born in Ukraine and educated at Moscow State University before studying in modern languages at the Moscow State Linguistic University of Maurice Thorese and theology at the St Andrew’s Biblical and Theological College. She came to Oxford to work in the area of Syriac studies at Wolfson College and presently she works as secretary to the Society of St Alban and St Sergius, Oxford. She has published a succession of articles in Russian and English journals.

Saleela Mabel (Bangalore), studied theology at the United Theological College at Bangalore. She has collaborated extensively with E.C. John on the new Malayalam Bible Dictionary and is currently working for her doctorate in Bangalore on the controversial significance of religious conversion in contemporary India.

Deva Mathias (Nagercoil) was a student of mathematics, philosophy and religion at the universities of Madurai Kamaraj and Serampore and Tamil Nadu Theological seminary and Madras Christian College. His doctorate at Annamalai University was a study of Gandhian philosophy. Today he is a scholar of social and religious movements in contemporary India and the Founder-President of the Vinnarasu Association of India. He is the editor of the association’s popular educational journal, Vinarassu and has an honorary doctorate from the Mahatma Gandhi University. He also works in the Academic Faculty of the Hindustan Bible Institute and College, Chennai. With Solomon Joseph he has researched the history of a number of regional Hindu cults, but his work is above all defined by his commitment to public education projects and social schemes in his home state of Tamil Nadu.

Cordelia Moyse (London) was educated at the universities of London and Cambridge. Her doctorate was a study of the reform or marriage and divorce law in England and Wales, 1909-1937 (1996). She has worked as the consultant archivist of the Mother’s Union at Mary Sumner house, London and published a succession of articles on the subject. She currently combines her scholarship with her work for Christian Aid. Her international history of the Mothers’ Union will be published by Oxford University Press in 2007.

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Maja Nenadovic (Mostar/Amsterdam) took her first degree in social sciences from University College in Utrecht, leading with Political Science, Modern History, Human Rights and Anthropology. Her MA in Political Science followed at the Central European University in Budapest and she received a second Master of Arts diploma from Leiden University, this time in International Relations and Diplomacy. Here her research was based upon her experiences in Mostar, Bosnia where she worked for UNHCR, assessing the return of families displaced by the conflict there. She is now beginning a doctorate at the University of Amsterdam focussing on the exercise and meaning of political will in post-conflict societies.

Ike Okonta (Oxford & Lagos) was born in Nigeria and now divides his time between Nigeria and the United Kingdom. He is a writer and historian of modern Nigeria. His doctorate at Oxford University was a study of the Ogoni political movements in Nigeria. He was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Los Angeles in 2003. Now he is writing a history of the Biafran war and his second novel. With Oronto Douglas he has written Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil in the Niger Delta (Random House, New York, 2001; Verso, London, 2003) and with Thomas Jaye, Zaya Yeebo and Professor Ibeany, Shattering the Face of Innocence; Youth and Conflict in West Africa (Community Development and Advocacy Centre, 2004). In 2005 he was short-listed for the Caine Prize in African Literature for a story published in Humanitas.

Alexandru Popescu (Oxford) was born in Romania and currently works at Littlemore Hospital in Oxford. He is a scholar of modern Romanian theology and philosophy.  His book Petre Tutea; Between Sacrifice and Suicide was published by Ashgate in 2004.

Marina Philippova (Berlin) is a musician who studied at the Gnessin Russian Music Academy in Moscow and the Leningrad State Conservatory. She played a prominent part in the performance of baroque and classical music in St Petersburg  in the 1980s with the  ‘original’ instruments ensemble Pro Anima. She has  made a succession of recordings of neglected eighteenth and nineteenth century repertoire, including the romances of Alexander Dargomyzhshy, the less-known songs of Glinka and Tchaikovsky, and works for voice and harp by Jean-Baptiste Cardon (1760-1803), the last of these for the Olympia label. In 2003 she was responsible for the first performance of Guiseppe Sarti’s opera Enea nel Lazio for two hundred years, an occasion which took place at the Hermitage Theatre in St Petersburg itself. This was subsequently recorded  for the Bongiovanni label. Marina Philippova now lives in Potsdam.

Jan Ross (Birmingham, Alabama) is a scholar of English literature.  She was educated at the University of Cambridge and went on to lecture at Baylor University in Texas, the University of Dallas and the Franciscan University at Ohio. She is currently editing the complete works of the English mystical poet and theologian Thomas Traherne for Boydell & Brewer. The first volume in the set was published in 2005.

Solomon Joseph (London) was born in Tamil Nadu, South India and educated at Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary before his ordimation as a minister of the Church of South India. He came to Britain to work in inter-faith relations under the sponsorship of the British Methodist church. Now he works in East London. He maintains active connections with Tamil Nadu and has completed a succession of studies of modern Indian Hindu cults.

Kadija Sesay (Leeds) is a writer, anthologist and scholar of modern Black British literature and an anthologist. She was educated at the University of Birmingham, is the editor of the literary magazine Sable and the editor of two important anthologies: IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (with Courttia Newland (2000) and Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature (2005).

Tatiana Shabalina (St. Petersburg) is a musicologist who teaches at the St Petersburg Conservatoire and specializes in the study of the work of J.S. Bach. She has published a succession of important studies of Bach’s work, and has edited a new Russian edition of Albert Schweitzer’s classic study of the composer. She is currently preparing a range of new critical editions of his chamber music. In 2004 she authenticated an uncatalogued manuscript of Bach's cantata BWV199 discovered in the library of Pushkin House, in St. Petersburg. This led to the creation of a new edition of the cantata, which was first performed in Köthen in 2005.

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Dorota Schreiber-Kurpiers (Opole) was educated at the University of Opole. Her post-graduate research explored the history of the Franciscan Sisters of Münster and then the Society of St Vincent de Paul. She participated in the publication of a series of Polish parliamentary sources, a project chaired by Professor Jan Seredyka. From here she became increasingly committed to the study of charitable and lay movements within modern Polish Catholicism and now she has published extensively in this field. She presently lectures in history in the School of Management and Business Studies at Opole University.

Buntu Siwisa (Capetown) is a scholar of political science and a writer. He grew up in the townships of Port Elizabeth and to the town of Alice, home of the first black university of South Africa. He became a student at the University of Natal and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University to research for his doctorate on the politics of water in post-Apartheid South Africa. He now lectures in political science at the Nelson Mandela University in Capetown.

Anna Skakalskaya (St Petersburg) was educated at St Petersburg State University. She is a scholar of medieval French history and an actress, based at the Theatre of Youth Creativity in St Petersburg. She also commits much of her time to teaching drama to children across the city. Her presentation of primary sources documenting the trials of Joan of Arc, the first such work to be published in Russian, will appear in 2006. She is also researching the medieval conception of the Earth itself, through the art of the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Merrilyn Thomas (Cambridge) is a historian and honorary research fellow at University College, London. Her interests focus on the Cold War in Europe and, in particular, the role played by the Christian Churches in the political conflict. Her book on the subject, Communing with the Enemy: Covert Operations, Christianity and Cold War Politics in Britain and the GDR, was published in 2005. She was awarded her first degree in European history at the University of East Anglia in 1969 and her doctorate at UCL in 2002. For many years she worked as a journalist, during which period she published a book on the death penalty in the USA, entitled Life on Death Row (1989).

Huamin Toshiko Mackman (Birmingham) was born in Japan. She is a scholar of modern Japanese religion and politics. Her doctorate at the University of Birmingham was a study of the Japanese delegation to the ecumenical mission conference at Tambaram in 1938. Presently she is studying the relationship between nationalism and religion in contemporary Japan.

Timothy Wangusa (Kampala) is a writer and a scholar of modern Anglophone literature. For many years he was Professor of literature at Makere University, Kampala. His novel Upon this Mountain was published by Heinemann in 1989; a collection of verse, A Pattern of Dust, followed in 1994. An English-Italian edition of his collection of poems, Anthem for Africa was published by La Rosa in Turin in 1995. A new collection of verse, African Epiphanies, will be published in Kampala by the Fountain Press in 2006. A text-book, Basics of Research Methodology, will be published by Bow and Arrow press in Kampala in 2006. He is also writing a second novel, Unto the Plains.

Eunice Wanjiru (Githunguri) lives in Kenya and is a Scholar of the institute. She won critical attention in 1999 for a script submitted to the BBC’s African performance competition. This was recorded in London in February 2000 and was published in Humanitas Vol. 3 No. 2 in April 2002.

W. Reg. Ward (Petersfield) is a scholar of the religious, political and social history of Europe. For many years he lectured at the University of Durham. His many books include Christianity Under the Ancien Régime 1648-1789 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999), The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002) and, with R. Heitzenrater, a number of volumes in The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 2003). He is currently completing a study of early Evangelicalism (to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2007).

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Ruth Waterman (London) is an international concert violinist, her appearances including London's Proms, New York's Great Performers at Lincoln Center, and St Petersburg's Hermitage (the first British violinist to play there). Her historical approach, leading to a deeply emotional response to music, has resulted in revelatory interpretations, not least her recording of Bach's accompanied sonatas (Meridian). She is also known for her lecture-recitals, her frequent broadcasts on radio and television, and her ongoing work in Bosnia conducting the Mostar Sinfonietta. She has coached or lectured at Oxford University, Royal Academy of Music, Juilliard School, Jerusalem Academy of Music and many others. For a number of years, she lived in New York where she was Professor of Music at City University of New York. She was included in the 2004 edition of The Great Violinists.

Alan Wilkinson (Portsmouth) was educated at the university of Cambridge before ordination in the Church of England. He is Diocesan Theologian at Portsmouth Cathedral and Visiting Lecturer at Portsmouth University. He is a scholar of modern British religious history and his many books include the Church of England and the First World War (1978), Dissent or Conform? War, Peace and the English Churches 1900-1945 (1986) and The Community of the Resurrection: A Centenary History (1992).

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ASSOCIATES OF THE INSTITUTE

Anne Lamb (London) is an educationalist who has for many years worked in the sphere of religious education under the aegis of the St Gabriel’s Trust. She has a particular commitment to the study of the relationship between language and moral action.

Ronald Swan (London) was for several years Master of the Royal Foundation of St Katharine, Limehouse, during which time he oversaw an immense modernization of the Foundation. A priest in the Church of England, he has worked with a number trusts in London.

Robert Grindrod (Huntingdon) for a number of years worked in National Health Service management. He is currently committed to researching questions of altruism.

THE DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE

Andrew Chandler (Chichester) was educated at the universities of Birmingham and Cambridge. He has taught modern history at the universities of Birmingham, Keele, Wolverhampton and British Columbia. He has published a number of studies of modern religious and political history, including Brethren in Adversity: Bishop George Bell and the Crisis of German Protestantism 1933-1938 (Boydell & Brewer, 1998), The Moral Imperative: New Studies in the Ethics of Resistance in National Socialist Germany (Westview, 1998) and The Terrible Alternative: Christian Martyrdom in the Twentieth Century (Cassell, 1998). His 1999 Lent Lectures at Westminster Abbey were published as Presences Felt: Encounters in a Lost Century (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2005). His history of the Church Commissioners of the Church of England, The Church of England in the Twentieth Century: The Church Commissioners and the Politics of Reform was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2006.

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