Our people

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.

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.

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.

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.

Former Acting Bursar at St Edmund's College.

My interests lie in the relationship between science and theology. Topics include: (i) the fine-tunings of natural law necessary for the universe to evolve life; (ii) Karl Barth’s rejection of natural theology; and (iii) ‘ramified natural theology’, i.e. the defence of specifically Christian claims.

The Revd Dr Rodney Holder read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge (MA, MMath), and spent two years teaching mathematics at The Manchester Grammar School. In 1974 he returned to academia to research for a D.Phil. in astrophysics at Christ Church, Oxford, following this with a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Astrophysics in Oxford. His research was on accretion of intergalactic gas by the galaxy. Dr Holder then spent fourteen years with EDS (formerly Scicon) as an operational research consultant to UK Ministry of Defence clients. This involved mathematical modelling and decision analysis applied to defence procurement, and led to several published papers. His first book on science and religion (Nothing But Atoms and Molecules? Probing the Limits of Science) was published in 1993. In 1994 Dr Holder returned to Oxford, taking a first class degree in theology, and a Diploma in Ministry. Following ordination in the Church of England, Dr Holder served in parish ministry in South Warwickshire, Heidelberg, and Buckinghamshire. During this time he published several papers and his second book, God, the Multiverse, and Everything: Modern Cosmology and the Argument from Design.

Dr Holder was Course Director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge, from its inception in January 2006 until 31 January 2013. He has remained active academically since then. His research focus has largely been in three areas: (i) utilizing Bayesian confirmation theory to assess the metaphysical significance of the fine-tunings of natural law necessary for the universe to be capable of evolving life; (ii) challenging Karl Barth’s rejection of natural theology through dialogue with major theologians who have succeeded him; and (iii) describing and utilizing ‘ramified natural theology’, which adopts the same Bayesian approach used to argue for the existence of God in natural theology, to defend specifically Christian claims about God’s acting in history in the person of Jesus Christ. Dr Holder has supervised undergraduates and postgraduate diploma students for ten colleges, including St Edmund’s, for the ‘Theology and Science’ paper in Part IIB of the Cambridge Theological and Religious Studies Tripos, 2007-2016. He has (2019 – 2025) taught overseas students on a Faraday Institute enrichment course and has given many lectures at Faraday Institute courses and more widely, here and overseas. Dr Holder’s further books include The Heavens Declare: Natural Theology and the Legacy of Karl Barth; Ramified Natural Theology in Science and Religion; and, co-edited with Simon Mitton, Georges Lemaître: Life, Science and Legacy. He was Reviews Editor of Science and Christian Belief and on the national committee of Christians in Science from 2006-2017. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion, a member of the Society of Ordained Scientists and of the Science and Religion Forum, and a trustee of The Faraday Institute.

Academic Profile

Publications 

• Rodney D. Holder, Ramified Natural Theology in Science and Religion: Moving on from Natural Theology, 2021, Abingdon, Oxon, and New York, NY: Routledge.
• Rodney D. Holder, God, the Multiverse, and Everything: Modern Cosmology and the Argument from Design, 2016 [2004], Abingdon, Oxon, and New York, NY: Routledge.
• R. D. Holder, The Heavens Declare: Natural Theology and the Legacy of Karl Barth, 2012, West Conshohocken: Templeton Press.
• Rodney Holder, ‘Georges Lemaître and Fred Hoyle: Contrasting Characters in Science and Religion’, in Rodney Holder and Simon Mitton (eds), Georges Lemaître: Life, Science and Legacy, 2012, Heidelberg: Royal Astronomical Society-Springer, 39-53.
• R. D. Holder, ‘Hume on Miracles’, 1998, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 49, 49-65.

Awards & Recognitions

• Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications
• Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion
• Templeton Foundation Prize for Exemplary Papers in Humility Theology (1998)

My research is in the the interface between Classical and Hellenistic culture and the rise of Christianity. focusing on the evolution of the Roman Community in the Second Century, on the political history of early Christianity, the positive role of ambiguous iconography in cultural transformation.

Allen Brent is a scholar in the field of Early Christian History, exploring the interface between Christianity and Classical Culture, particularly in the development of Church Order. At the Augustinianum, the Patristics Institute of the Lateran University, Rome, he taught whilst working on his research project a second semester course on early Christian history, addressing non-literary, epigraphic and iconographic sources in addition to literary ones. He was joined by his King's London PhD students, who were resident and supervised at the British School at Rome.

He has British Academy and Leverhulme research awards, 1. Early "Christian" Epigraphy and Iconography: A new approach to Dölger's classical project. (British Academy: BR100083), administered by Kings London. 2. Cyprian and Julian: Pagan and Christian Concepts of Order. Leverhulme Trust (Cambridge, Divinity). 3. Christian-Pagan syncretism emerging in the time of Julian and its literary, epigraphic and iconographic antecedents (British Academy: SG-49301). These research projects funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust have resulted in the production of (i) a new model of episcopacy that is cultural rather than territorial, (ii) a critical account of the development of the Papacy in the late second century from a ‘fractionalized’ structure of distinct house churches into an episcopal monarchy, (iii) a critical analysis of the development of church order in a Graeco-Roman historical and cultural context and (iv) the role of iconography in the transformation of culture.

The impact of his early work on church order resulted in his proposed model of cultural rather than territorial episcopacy leading to the creation of Anglican bishops in Australia with cultural rather than territorial jurisdiction representing Aboriginal and Islander, indigenous communities. These bishops welcomed Pope John Paul II to Australia at Alice Springs on an ecumenical gathering in 1986. Allen was the Former Acting Dean at St Edmund's.

He is joint editor with Markus Vinzent of Studia Patristica and is a member of the editiorial board of Vetera Christianorum.

Publications

• Allen Brent, A Political History of Early Christianity, 2009, Clarke-Continuum, ISBN-10: 0567031756
• Allen Brent, Ignatius of Antioch and the Second Sophistic, 2006, Mohr Siebeck, ISBN-10: 316148794X
• Allen Brent, The Imperial Cult and the Development of Church Order, 1999, Brill, ISB 10 : 9004114203
• Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century, 1995, Brill, ISBN-10: ‎9004102450
• Allen Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, 2010, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-51547-4

Awards & Recognitions

• Higher doctorate of Cambridge University (DD), following peer review examination of published corpus
• Fellow of the Academia Ambrosiana, Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan

Parul Bhandari is a sociologist specialising in the study of social inequalities in the Global South. Her specific research focus is on gender and class identities and media and technology in South Asia. Parul Bhandari is Director of Studies (DoS) for Human, Social, and Political Sciences (HSPS), Bye-Fellow, and Associate Tutor at St. Edmund’s College, College Teaching Associate (CTA) and Bye-Fellow at Downing College, and external Director of Studies (DoS) for HSPS at Queens’ College. She contributes to teaching and supervising at the Department of Sociology and the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. She has published four academic books: Dissent with Love: Ambiguity, Affect and Transformation in South Asia (Routledge, 2024), Matchmaking in Middle Class India: Beyond Arranged and Love Marriage (Springer, 2020), Money, Culture, Class: Elite Women as Modern Subjects, (Routledge, London 2019), and Exploring Indian Modernities: Ideas and Practices (co-edited) (Springer, 2018). In addition, Bhandari’s research has been published in academic journals including Contemporary South Asia, Gender, Place & Culture, and South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ). Her works are accessible to non-specialists by way of her regular writings in popular outlets such as The Hindustan Times, The Conversation, Scroll.in. Her research been quoted in the BBC, CNN, and panel discussions and podcasts on NPR, Al Jazeera, The Conversation and NDTV.

Prior to joining University of Cambridge, she was Associate Professor of Sociology at O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), India, and has held Guest Faculty positions at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, and the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics (DSE), University of Delhi. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, and the Centre of South Asian Studies (CSAS), University of Cambridge, and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), Delhi (South Asia research unit for the CNRS). She was a student at St. Edmund’s College whilst pursuing MPhil and doctoral degrees.