Our people

My research focuses on reconciliation, applied ethics, political theology, and interreligious dialogue, with emphasis on antisemitism, Islamophobia, extremism, and peacebuilding in the Middle East and Europe, promoting empathy, justice, and coexistence.

Dr Barakat researches reconciliation, applied ethics, political theology, and interreligious dialogue, with a focus on antisemitism, Islamophobia, gender, and peacebuilding in the Middle East and Europe. She directs the European Wasatia Graduate School.

Academic Profile

Publications

• Zeina Barakat & Thies Münchow, “Introduction to the Volume” in Echoes of Bonhoeffer. The Political Dimensions of Reconciliation and Interfaith Encounter. Essays in honour of Ralf K. Wüstenberg, Freiburg Germany:WBG Academic Verlag Herder 2025.
• Zeina Barakat, Envisioning Reconciliation: Signs of Hope for the Middle East Conflict (Reconciliation and Conflict Resolution Vol. 1), Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (2022). Review: Colin H. Williams, in Religion & Theology 30:3 (2023), pp. 136-138.
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• Zeina Barakat. From Heart of Stone to Heart of Flesh: Evolutionary Journey from Extremism to Moderation (ta ethica Vol 17, edd N. Knoepfler, E. Mack), Munich: Utz 2017 (Doctoral Thesis).
• Zeina Barakat, Thies Münchow, Ralf K. Wüstenberg (eds), Islam & Democracy (Law, Gender and the West (Reconciliation and Conflict Resolution Seies, Vol. 2), Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2022.

Professor Maria Burke's research expertise concerns the application of new digital technology to economic, environmental and social systems. She has a particular interest in the regulation of AI. 

Professor Maria Burke, PhD, MBA, MA, DMS, SFHEA, FRSA, is an academic and researcher at Birkbeck, University of London, and an Emerita Professor at the University of Winchester where she served as Head of Research for almost a decade. A Bye Fellow of St Edmund's College, she co-founded the Fragility and Flourishing research group at the Von Hügel Institute. Her research examines the intersection of digital technology and its economic, environmental, and social impacts, with a focus on AI regulatory frameworks. In 2023, she was honoured to receive the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) Accolade Award. Professor Burke continues to contribute to international academic and policy discussions on AI regulation. In 2025 she was an invited speaker at New York University and the European Women’s Technology Conference in Amsterdam.

Paolo Carozza is Professor of Law and Concurrent Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA), where he has been on the faculty since 1996. His expertise is in the areas of comparative constitutional law, human rights, law and development, and international law. His more recent books and edited volumes include The Practice of Human Development and Dignity (2020), Dialogues on Italian Constitutional Justice (2020), Italian Constitutional Justice in Global Context (2016), Comparative Legal Traditions (2014), and Regional Protection of Human Rights (2013). His numerous articles, published in four languages, have focused primarily on foundational principles of human rights law, such as human dignity, democracy, and subsidiarity.

From 2012-2022 he served as the Director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, an interdisciplinary institute focusing primarily on the themes of democracy and human development, where he was also the founder and principal investigator of the Notre Dame Constitutionalism and Rule of Law Lab.

Carozza currently serves as a member of the Oversight Board, an independent expert body created by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to render binding decisions and policy recommendations regarding difficult content moderation questions on Meta’s platforms. From 2019-2023 he was the United States member of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the Venice Commission), the Council of Europe’s expert advisory body on issues of constitutionalism, the rule of law, democracy, and fundamental rights. In 2019-2020 he was a member of the U.S. State Department’s independent, nonpartisan, advisory Commission on Unalienable Rights. From 2006 to 2010 Carozza was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the principal international body responsible for the promotion and protection of human rights in the Western Hemisphere, and served as its President in 2008-09. He was appointed by Pope Francis in 2016 to be a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Dr. Elif Çetin is an Associate Professor of International Relations and a Faculty member at the Department of International Relations, Yaşar University (Izmir, Turkey). Additionally, she is a Research Associate at the Von Hügel Institute, St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. Since September 2023, she has been the Head of the UNESCO Chair on International Migration at Yaşar University, which is the first and only UNESCO Chair in Turkey that specifically focuses on migration.

Dr. Çetin holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. She was a visiting scholar at the EUI (Florence) and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) (Oxford). Her research interests include politicisation of immigration, political discourse formation, and development of immigration control policies in Europe and beyond. Her publications focus on different dimensions of migration management and control policies.

Dr. Maria Cimperman is a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (RSCJ). Her Master of Divinity is from the University of Notre Dame, Licentiate in Sacred Theology from Weston Jesuit School of Theology and PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College. A faculty member at Catholic Theological Union (Chicago, USA), she recently received promotion to full Professor of Theological Ethics and Consecrated Life.

Dr Cimperman is the author of three books: When God’s People Have HIV/AIDS: An Approach to Ethics;  Social Analysis for the 21^st Century: How Faith Becomes Action;  and Religious Life For Our World: Creating Communities of Hope. She also co-edited Engaging Our Diversity: Interculturality and Consecrated Life Today. She presents nationally and internationally.

In addition to theological ethics, Maria’s passion is theology of consecrated life. Dr. Cimperman served for 8 years as the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Consecrated Life at CTU. During 2021-2022, Maria was one of two women religious theologians [with Dr Gemma Simmonds, CJ] and two men religious theologians serving on the UISG-USG [International Union of Superiors General and Union of Superiors General] Synod Synthesis Commission which read and together prepared a synthesis of the responses from religious around the globe for the two Unions.   She serves on the Editorial Board of Review for Religious and the Board of Directors of CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate).  This Fall she will continue at CTU while beginning a position at UISG in Rome coordinating their global Synodality Initiative.

Gianmarco Contino is an Associate Professor of Cancer Genomic Medicine and Group Leader in the Department of Cancer and Genetic Sciences at the University of Birmingham Medical School. He also serves as an Upper GI Consultant at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, part of the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust, and as the Translational Lead for Precision Health Technologies at the University of Birmingham. Additionally, he is the Director of the MSc in Clinical Oncology at the University of Birmingham and the Network Chair of the EORTC Pathobiology Group. Gianmarco is a Research Fellow at the Von Hügel Institute, University of Cambridge, where he explores topics in the epistemology of medicine and the implications of artificial intelligence.

Previously, Gianmarco was a Clinical Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s Hospital. His training in surgical oncology and translational science included positions at the European Institute of Oncology (Milan), Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston), the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Imperial College London. He consulted for AI-driven biotech companies, including Cambridge Cancer Genomics (now part of Nvidia) and EpistemicAI.

Gianmarco's research focuses on functional genomics of aneuploidy and upper gastrointestinal cancers. As part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium, he worked on identifying structural variations driving oesophageal adenocarcinoma. His current research leverages functional genomics approaches to understand the molecular mechanisms behind chromosomal instability in oesophageal adenocarcinoma, with active studies involving Genomics England and UK Biobank.

Clinically, Gianmarco specializes in advanced endoscopy and endoscopic treatment for upper gastrointestinal cancers. He has published extensively on the genomics and molecular therapeutics of pancreatic and oesophageal adenocarcinoma, with contributions appearing in leading journals such as Science and Nature.

Gianmarco is passionate about training the next generation of clinician-scientists and volunteers with organisations that support students from disadvantaged backgrounds to enter STEM fields.

Professor Ken Dark is an archaeologist and historian specialising in the 1st millennium AD in Europe and the Middle East, archaeological method and theory, and the application of long-term perspectives to the contemporary world. A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute, and an elected member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, he has written 15 books and numerous papers, and directed archaeological projects in Istanbul, beside the Sea of Galilee, and in Nazareth – where he identified a 1st century house believed by many to have been the childhood home of Jesus. In addition to desk-based research, and fieldwork at Tintagel in Cornwall, he is currently directing research on the mission centre at Canterbury established in 597 by Gregory the Great to convert England.

I research how the moral values of love and justice can reshape institutions to foster mutual care. I’m currently working with hospitals in Chile on a scorecard that fosters spaces of encounter and enables caregivers—like mothers and health professionals—in giving and receiving loving care.

Thana C. de Campos-Rudinski is an Associate Professor at the School of Government and the Institute of Applied Ethics at the Pontifical Catholic University in Chile. She has a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford.

Her research and teaching examine how laws and public policies impact the way we think and live the most fundamental aspects of life: love, family, friendship, the interdependence among people and countries. Her work has analysed the problems of global poverty, medical suffering, communicable diseases and pandemics, the loneliness epidemic, and grief. Her discussions draw on relational theories of justice (Aquinas and Finnis in particular), virtue ethics, and feminist ethics of care.

In The Global Health Crisis: Ethical Responsibilities (CUP, 2017) she discusses the duties of justice that we have (or do not have), as both individuals and nations, to aid those vulnerable people in remote areas afflicted by certain grave illnesses for which there is no adequate or accessible medical treatment. Her forthcoming book The Rule of Love: The Power of Presence for Reforming Health Institutions and Global Health Governance (OUP) investigates how love – together with justice – helps us revisit how we should structure our healthcare institutions at the local, national, and global levels, to foster an organizational culture of encounter, presence, and accompaniment with those suffer – without being inefficient or financially reckless. Current research projects include 'Lonely Mothers, Loving Institutions and Institutional Homemaking', which examines how the application of the philosophical concepts of love and homemaking could help us reimagine contemporary institutions, laws, and public policies such as those contemplating universal day-care and personalized perinatology (maternal-foetal medicine), in how they may impact mothers and as a consequence father, children, families, communities, and the common good more broadly.

Thana was a fellow at Princeton’s Institute for International and Regional Studies (2021) and is the co-director of the research program Dignity and Equity in Women’s Health of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights.

Academic Profile

Maria Devlin McNair is a writer, researcher, and podcast producer whose credits include “Article 13,” “Ministry of Ideas," "Illuminations," "Genealogies of Modernity," and "Shakespeare For All." Her work draws on literature, philosophy, theology, and social science to explore what, together, these fields can teach us about how we lead flourishing lives.

A mother of 3, McNair holds a PhD in English Literature from Harvard University and lives in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

My research focuses on relationship between religion and democracy in the Mediterranean region; interreligious dialogue; global Catholicism and Islam; and religious conceptions of humanism.

Michael Driessen is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and the inaugural Director of the MA program in International Affairs at John Cabot University.

Michael received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame and has been a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar as well as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He has taught at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna and holds a research affiliation with Cambridge University’s Von Hügel Institute. He also serves as an advisor for the Adyan Foundation in Lebanon.

Professor Driessen also directs the Rome Summer Seminars on Religion and Global Politics, an annual writing workshop and policy dialogue supported by a consortium of institutions and scholars working at the crossroads of religion and international relations and held under the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is also a longtime member of the communities of L’Arche and am working on the Disability and Knowledge research project co-sponsored by the Von Hügel Institute.

Driessen’s books include The Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue (Oxford University Press, 2023), Human Fraternity and Inclusive Citizenship: Interreligious Engagement in the Mediterranean (ISPI, 2021; co-edited with Fabio Petito and Fadi Daou), and Religion and Democratization (Oxford University Press, 2014). He has published scholarly articles in Comparative Politics, Sociology of Religion, Politics and Religion, Constellations and Democratization and essays in America Magazine and Commonweal.

Academic Profile

My research focuses on all aspects of Intellectual Property.

Qualifying in Pharmacology at Kings College London, called to the Bar in 1989, St. Edmunds College Camb, Research Associate, Intellectual Prop. 2015 - 2025, Notre Dame University – Prof. of IP, 2018 – 2020-advocacy and IP for New York State JDs, Hon. Soc. of Gray’s Inn Advocacy Trainer – 2010-current, Visiting Professor – Trade Mark for Practitioners Course - Brunel University & Oxford University. Appointed Bencher (Master) of Hon Soc. of Gray’s Inn – 1999- current ; Chair-elect – Bar Association for Commerce Finance and Industry; Elected Member of the Bar Council (twice); Member of the IP Commission Panel of the Federation Barreaux D’Europe (The European Bar).

Directorships: Autumnpaper Ltd – Alexander McQueen’s company – 2005-2006; The Globe Theatre – Development Council – twice-present.

Published Engelman's IP Updates - Bloomsbury; published over 40 IP papers; notable cases: Intel Corp v CPM (UK) Ltd cited daily in courts & tribunals ojn Trade Mark Dilution across the UK & all Member States of the EU.

Personal Website

The Rev Dr Luigi Gioia is the Theologian in Residence at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City and a Visiting Scholar at the Von Hügel Institute at the University of Cambridge (UK).

A scholar of systematic theology, he focuses particularly on the Trinity, ecclesiology, and the relationship between theology and spirituality. Working at the crossroads of academy and church, he speaks and writes for both academic and general audiences, seeking to make rigorous theological reflection accessible and pastorally grounded. He is the author of The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate (OUP, 2016, with a foreword by Rowan Williams), Say It to God: In Search of Prayer, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book 2018 (Bloomsbury, 2017), and Saint Benedict's Wisdom: Monastic Spirituality and the Life of the Church (Liturgical Press, 2020). His award-winning books have been translated into six languages.

Academic Profile

Publications 

• Luigi Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate, 2016, OUP: Oxford. Paperback edition with a foreword by Rowan Williams.
• Luigi Gioia, “The Threat of Death As a Test for Theological Authenticity”, 2017, in The Practice of the Presence of God: Theology As a Way of Life, Ed. Martin Laird and Sheelah Treflé Hidden, Routledge: New York, 120-9.
• Luigi Gioia, St Benedict’s Wisdom. Monastic Spirituality and the Life of the Church, 2020, Liturgical Press: Collegeville (MN, USA), and Canterbury Press (UK)
• Luigi Gioia, “St Benedict’s Rule as the Antidote to Regulatory Inflation”, 2021, Reviews in Religion & Theology, 28:1, 4-9.
• Luigi Gioia, “Prayer in the Secular City”, 2024, Concilium 4, 41-50

Awards and recognitions 

• The book Say It To God. In Search of Prayer (Bloomsbury, 2017) was chosen as the Archbishop of Canterbury Lent Book 2018.
• The book St Benedict’s Wisdom. Monastic Spirituality and the Life of the Church (Liturgical Press, 2020) received the First Place in the category of Spirituality Award by the CMA (Catholic Media Association) in 2021.

My research focuses on anthropology in the age of artificial intelligence, the spiritual resources of human intelligence, and the pre-modern tradition of Christian orthodoxy. I am the director of the research project "Embodiment in Theological Anthropology", funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

Johannes Hoff is VHI Senior Research Associate and Full Professor at the Institute of Systematic Theology of the University of Innsbruck (Austria), succeeding Karl Rahner. Prior to this he was Professor of Philosophical Theology at Heythrop College, University of London, St David’s University of Wales (previously University of Wales, Lampeter), and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. His first academic monograph was on the theological implications of the work of Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau, his second on Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). His first English-language monograph, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (2013), brought together these areas of research. It shows how Cusa developed a critical response to the celebration of mathematically generated 'images of the world' in early modern art and science, and the related narcissistic fascination with immersive virtual spaces. In his German monograph Defence of the Sacred. Anthropology of the Digital Transformation (2021), Hoff presents a first synthesis of his recent research on anthropology in the age of artificial intelligence. According to Hoff, the digital transformation has caused an economically accelerated devastation of spiritual diversity that has provoked one of the greatest civilizational ruptures since the Axal Age, in which the religious and philosophical traditions of world history originated (around 500 BC). This challenge, Hoff argues, requires us to revise the theological underpinnings that have made our modern view of humanity plausible in the wake of the media-technological innovations of the Renaissance. Moreover, it requires us to recover the spiritual potentials that distinguish humans from computing machines and mark them as intellectually gifted, personal beings. His research on a Trinitarian anthropology of technology, building on Augustine and Cusa, is a first response to this challenge. Against this background, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) granted the research project "4e Cognition in Theological Anthropology" proposed by Johannes Hoff in collaboration with Enrico Grube, which started in September 2023. The project explores the significance of the body/living body problem for Christian doctrine from a historical and systematic perspective, with particular emphasis on the doctrine of salvation and the patristic doctrine of the deification of man (theosis). The findings of contemporary phenomenology of the body and the neurobiological concept of embodied intelligence are hypothesised to facilitate a reorientation of Christian anthropology in the context of its historical sources. Part of this research is Hoff's research cooperation with the "Institute for Information Systems & Society" at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration.

My research is in theology, intellectual disability and Christian community. My current work uses a participative approach, investigating belonging to a Christian community of differing intellectual abilities with members of the community.

Carole received her PhD from the University of Durham, where she worked on Rowan Williams’ concept of difficulty as a tool for negotiating difference between religious and secular life and commitment in the public square. She was a member of the academic staff of Wesley House in the Cambridge Theological Federation from 2015 to 2021, and Director of Studies from 2017, teaching political theology and leading the MA programme on Pastoral Care and Chaplaincy. Carole is currently project leader for Growing in Friendship, a participative theological action research project of the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability and Lyn’s House Cambridge. Lyn’s House is a Christian community of friendship for people with and without intellectual disabilities. The Growing in Friendship project is the first instance of participative research using a theological action research approach with a community of differing intellectual abilities. She is also a member of the Von Hügel Institute’s research project Disability and Knowledge in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway and L’Arche Italy. She is ordained in the British Methodist Church, has served on its Faith and Order Committee, and is currently a member of the British Methodist-Roman Catholic Dialogue Commission. She studied in Cambridge (King’s College) for her first degree in Modern Languages (French and Italian).

Academic Profile

Scott Jackson has served as the Mary Irene Ryan Family Executive Director of Shakespeare at Notre Dame since the position was created in 2007, providing oversight for the many Shakespeare-related programs housed at the University of Notre Dame, with a particular focus on engaging the local community through the works of William Shakespeare.

Previously he served as executive director for the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre (FST) in Fairbanks, Alaska. At FST he produced and performed in outdoor Shakespeare productions staged under the midnight sun at venues throughout Alaska and around the globe (most notably at the VIII World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane, Australia, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland). From 2000–2003, Scott was the business and legal affairs coordinator for Brighter Pictures, Ltd (now a part of Endemol Shine UK), one of the United Kingdom’s most successful independent television and film production companies.
He holds a dual BA in theatre and history from Indiana University Bloomington, an MFA (distinction) in Actor Training and Coaching from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London), and is a certified Kundalini yoga teacher (CKYT-200) under acclaimed practitioner Maya Fiennes. He has produced, directed, and performed in over 175 theatrical productions.

Scott currently serves as the vice president/president-elect for the Shakespeare Theatre Association, where he also served as treasurer from 2013-2017. He has taught acting process at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the University of Notre Dame, Holy Cross College, and Indiana University South Bend. Since 2018 he has taught Meisner acting technique and Mindfulness for the Artist for the Prague Shakespeare Company’s Summer Shakespeare Intensive.

A firm believer in the power of Shakespeare and the theatre arts to affect positive social change, he is a co-founder of the Shakespeare in Prisons Network. He teaches a Shakespeare in performance course and leads the kundalini yoga club at the Westville Correctional Facility, Indiana’s largest state prison.

Additionally, he has developed an anti-harm approach to actor training called Foundationing and presented this research at the annual meetings of the European Society of Criminology, the British Shakespeare Association, the Shakespeare Theatre Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, Theatre Communications Group, and the World Shakespeare Congress.

He is the recipient of the Shakespeare Association of America’s Publics Award for the production of the 4th International Shakespeare in Prisons Conference in 2020-21, the Robinson Community Learning Center’s Arthur Quigley, PhD award for community service, and the Fairbanks, Alaska Downtown Association’s Golden Heart award.

Isidoros (né Charalampos) Katsos is Assistant Professor of Theological Epistemology and Philosophy at the Divinity Faculty, National University of Athens. He holds a PhD in Human Rights, Ecology, and Cultural Heritage Law (Freie Universität Berlin, 2009); and a PhD in Philosophy and Theology (University of Cambridge, 2019), under the supervision of Rowan Williams. He has studied law in Athens, Paris and Berlin; and philosophy and theology in Athens and Cambridge. Previous appointments include a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford; a Junior Research Fellowship at Campion Hall, Oxford; and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for the Study of Christianity, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Αuthor of The Metaphysics of Light in the Hexaemeral Literature: From Philo of Alexandria to Gregory of Nyssa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023); and – as Charalampos Katsos – of Nachhaltiger Schutz des kulturellen Erbes: Zur ökologischen Dimension des Kulturgüterschutzes (Baden-Baden: Nomos ; Zürich: Dike ; Wien: Facultas, 2011). His teaching and research interests focus on ‘Christian Philosophy’, largely defined, and the intersection of theology, ecology, and human rights in the age of A.I.

Professor Mihaela Kelemen is Chair in Business and Society at Nottingham University Business School, UK where she is also Director of Professional Practice and Acting Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange. She has developed a creative methodology of stakeholder engagement and knowledge co-production entitled Cultural Animation which underpins a variety of participatory research projects funded by the AHRC, GCRF, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC and HEFCE on topics including community sustainability, food poverty, health inequalities, and post-disaster reconstruction. Her most recent projects focus on hardly reached communities and the importance of their voice and agency in building trust with relevant institutions in order to address health inequalities. Her most recent international project explored the relationship between hope, futurity and agency from the point of view of marginalised women from conflict affected areas in the Philippines and Pakistan.

Her research has been disseminated in top academic journals as well as via books, podcasts, interviews, virtual games, documentary dramas and community based exhibitions curated jointly with the award winning New Vic Theatre. She is an expert at the University of Nottingham Rights Lab, a fellow of the RSA and a member of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships Peer Review College and of the AHRC Peer Review College.

As a scholar educated in international relations, peace and conflict studies, sociology, religious studies and theology, I carry out research on various intersections of international affairs, migration, peacebuilding, EU foreign and security policy, and religion.

Dr Vladimir Kmec joined the Von Hügel Institute as a Research Affiliate in 2013 and was appointed Research Associate in 2017. At the University of Cambridge, he supervised undergraduate students at the Department of Politics and International Studies and served as a Research Associate at the European Centre. He coordinated the Politics and International Relations courses at Trinity Hall and Downing College and lectured in the International Security summer programme at Magdalene College. He previously held academic appointments as a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin and as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Groningen.

As a Peterhouse Scholar at the University of Cambridge, he analysed the EU’s peacebuilding efforts within the framework of the Common Security and Defence Policy. As a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar at Trinity College Dublin, he examined the interplay of migration and religion. He was also a visiting scholar at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the University of Göttingen. He studied at the University of Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Ottawa, Comenius University in Bratislava, Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen and Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Beyond academia, Vlado brings extensive experience from his work with the United Nations (DPKO and UNMAS), international NGOs, media outlets and faith-based organisations. He has served on boards of academic associations and youth organisations. He has advised the United Nations and the European Union—including the Political and Security Committee of the Council of the EU and the European External Action Service. Since 2022, Vlado has served as Programme Officer for Central and Eastern Europe at the Ecumenical Centre in Berlin.

Vlado is an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests at the intersection of international relations, European security, peace and conflict studies, sociology, theology and religious studies. He has conducted empirical fieldwork in Ireland, Germany, the Western Balkans, Mali, and in Brussels and New York. In recognition of his contributions to research on European security and defence as well as his engagement in European-level initiatives, Vlado was awarded the European Award for Citizenship, Security and Defence – Special Award for European Security and Defence, along with the Medal of the French President, at the 2018 Berlin Security Conference.

Publications

• 'Minority Religions and Immigration in Ireland', in Ganiel and Holmes (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland, Oxford University Press, 2024, 522–541.
• EU Missions and Peacebuilding: Building Peace Through Common Security and Defence Policy, Abingdon: Routledge, 2022.
• 'Inclusiveness and Exclusiveness of Religious Actors in Peace Negotiations', with Gladys Ganiel, International Negotiation, Vol. 24 (1), 2019, 136–163.
• 'The Establishment of the Peacebuilding Commission: Reflecting Power Shifts at the United Nations', International Peacekeeping, Vol. 24 (2), 2017, 304-322.
• 'United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei' Oxford Handbook of UN Peacekeeping Operations

Lorraine Krall McCrary is Associate Professor of political science at Wabash College, a liberal arts school in Indiana, where she is also Department Chair. After serving as a visiting scholar at St Edmund’s, Lorraine has been appointed as a Research Associate to continue her work on disability and community at the VHI.

McCrary is a political theorist whose research focuses on communities of care that include people with disabilities. She is drafting a monograph provisionally entitled, Care for Citizens: A New Political Theory of Cognitive Disability and Community. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, which supported work on earlier phases of this project. She also writes about topics in politics and literature, as well as the relationship between the family and politics.

Lorraine earned her Ph.D. from Georgetown University where she wrote about Alexis de Tocqueville’s and John Stuart Mill’s conceptions of women as members of families and as political actors. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Political Science Association, among other institutions. An advocate of community-engaged learning, Lorraine’s classes bring students outside the university to learn with people who have been excluded from colleges and universities, including people with cognitive disabilities and incarcerated people.