Anuradha Dooney was awarded her BA in Social Science, from University College Dublin, and her M.St. in the Study of Religion, from Oxford University. Her masters thesis was an exploration of faith development in the Vaishnava tradition. She is currently a Fellow of the OCHS, acting as a faculty member of the Continuing Education Department. Anuradha has been a tutor for courses in London, Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge, and Leicester since 2003. She has acted as the principal curriculum writer for undergraduate degree courses granted by the University of Wales, Lampeter, courses taught in the UK and Belgium. She has also organised and run academic and interfaith workshops, seminars and conferences internationally. Anuradha is a respected lecturer and broadcaster.
Fellows
Gillian Evison read theology at St. John's College, Oxford before moving to Wolfson College to complete the M.Phil in Classical Indian Religion. She worked part time in Wolfson College library, whilst finishing her D.Phil, and developed an interest in its collection of books on Indian religions. She started work at the Indian Institute Library, the Bodleian Library's specialist unit devoted to South Asian materials, in 1990 and was appointed as its Librarian in 1993. Gillian is also She serves on a number of national committees devoted to South Asian librarianship and her special interests include the use of new technologies to open up access to South Asian collections in libraries and museums.
Dr Jessica Frazier is from Washington DC, USA. Jessica is a Fellow of the Centre and helps to organise lectures and seminars, research projects, conferences, and fellowships. Jessica is also a member of the Centre's teaching staff, tutoring in the Faculty of Theology, and serves as secretary of our Academic Council, our Academic Planning Committee and the Theology Faculty's Study of Religions group.
She was awarded her B.A. and DPhil from Cambridge University and received an MsT in Religion from Oxford University. She is interested in Hinduism, the Nature of Religion, and the Philosophy of Religion, and is the author of Reality, Religion and Passion: Indian and Western Approaches in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Rupa Gosvami (2009), and the Continuum Companion to Hinduism (2010). She is also founding editor of the Journal of Hindu Studies, published by Oxford University Press.
Dr Sanjukta Gupta worked as a lecturer in Sanskrit at Visva Bharati, Calcutta and Jadavpur Universities from 1958 to 1966. She subsequently joined Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 1967, where she held the post of senior lecturer in Sanskrit until 1986. She is presently a member of the Oriental Faculty of Oxford University, where she is a part-time tutor. Apart from Sanskrit, Dr Gupta also specialises in Indian philosophy (Vedanta) and ancient Indian religions, with particular emphasis on Tantra, Vaishnavism and bhakti and gender studies.
Dr. Rembert Lutjeharms is from Brussels, Belgium. Rembert is the Librarian at the Centre, and as a member of our Academic Planning Committee also helps to organise lectures and seminars at the Centre.
He was awarded his BA and MA in Oriental Studies from the University of Ghent, Belgium, and successfully completed his D.Phil. in Theology at the University of Oxford in 2010, focusing on the theology of the sixteenth-century Caitanya Vaishvana poet and literary critic Kavikarnapura. His research interests are Sanskrit poetry and poetics, early Caitanya Vaisnava history, and Sanskrit hermeneutics.
Rembert has been teaching for our Hindu Studies Certificate Course since 2004 and is also an editor of the Journal of Hindu Studies, published by Oxford University Press.
Peggy Morgan is currently Honorary President of the British Association for the Study of Religions and Lecturer in World Religions at Mansfield College, Oxford, Where she convenes a fortnightly interdisciplinary seminar series in the study of religions. She has degrees in both theology and religious studies and has been involved not only in education in a variety of arenas, including schools, continuing education and distance learning degrees, but also in interfaith dialogue at various local, national and international levels. She is a former chair of the Shap Working Party on World Religions in Education and of The Trustees of the International Interfaith centre, of which she is now a patron. Between September 1996 and May 2002 she was also Director of The Religious Experience Research Centre and her publications include: (with C. Lawton) Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions; (with M. Braybrooke) Testing the Global Ethic; and (with W.O. Cole) Six Religions in the Twenty-First Century.
Kenneth Valpey, USA (1999–2004)
St Cross College
BA (honours) in Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA, 1996.
MA, in the Cultural and Historical Study of Religion, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, US. 1998.
M.St. in the Study of Religion, Oxford University, 2000.
D.Phil., Oxford University, offering a dissertation entitled The Grammar and Poetics of Murti-Seva: Caitanya Vaisnava Image Worship as Discourse, Ritual, and Narrative, 2004.
In 2006 Dr Valpey's dissertation was published in revised form with the Routledge/OCHS Hindu Studies Series as a monograph entitled Attending Krsna’s Image: Caitanya Vaisnava Murti-seva as Devotional Truth.
He is presently working with Dr. Ravi M. Gupta on an edited volume, a ‘companion’ to the Bhagavata Purana, and on a translation of a 16th century Sanskrit Vaisnava ritual text, the Haribhaktivilasa, together with Dr. Mans Broo (Abo Akademie, Finland).
Having taught courses in Indian and Asian religions for the year 2006 at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and having taught for the academic year 2007-08 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, he presently continues to teach at CUHK each Autumn semester as a Visiting Scholar.
Bjarne Wernicke Olesen is from Aarhus, Denmark. He was awarded his BA in Classical Indology and his BA and MA in the Study of Religion from Aarhus University where he now teaches courses in Sanskrit, Pāli and Indian religions at the Section for the Study of Religion. He has travelled extensively in Asia and Europe, studied in Hamburg, Delhi, and Kathmandu, and spend time as a visiting scholar at OCHS. In 2007 he received a PhD scholarship at the Faculty of Theology, Aarhus University, and is currently undertaking doctoral research in the area of Hindu ‘Śāktism’ and working on the Śākta Traditions project at OCHS together with Prof. Gavin Flood. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre and interested in Hindu and Buddhist traditions in South Asia (especially medieval Tantric traditions), Hindu Studies, and the history of research on religion. He is coauthor of a new Danish translation of the Bhagavadgītā published in 2009.