Academic Staff

Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

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.

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.

Anuradha Dooney

Anuradha 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.

Peggy Morgan

Peggy Morgan was a former Honorary President of the British Association for the Study of Religions and Lecturer in World Religions at Mansfield College, Oxford. 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.

Publications include:

• Testing the Global Ethic (with M. Braybrooke) - Conexus Publishers (1998)
• Six Religions in the Twenty-First Century (with W.O. Cole) - Nelson Thornes (2000)
• Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions (with C. Lawton) - Columbia University Press (2007)

Nicholas Sutton

As Director for the Centre’s CE Dept. Nicolas is responsible for the development and accreditation of courses, teaching provision, assessment of course work, online provision, and publications. He also teaches and offers tutorials for students of our Hindu Studies Certificate Course. Dr Sutton currently lectures in Religious Studies for the Open University, and in Hinduism for the University of Nottingham. His work has also brought him into close contact with the Hindu communities in the North of England where he worked with Preston College and the local temples in organising courses of study in Hindu scripture and Hindu religious practice.

Publications Include:

• Dr Sutton has contributed a number of articles on the Hindu tradition to academic journals, as well as chapters in edited books.
• Religious Doctrines in the Mahabharata - published by Motilal Benarsidass, Delhi (2000)

Research Fellows

Kiyokazu Okita

After serving as a lecturer at Department of Religion, University of Florida, Dr Kiyokazu Okita is currently a JSPS post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Indological Studies, Kyoto University. Starting from April 2013, he will be serving as an assistant professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University.

Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

About
Dr Wernicke-Olesen is a Research Lecturer at the Centre. He teaches courses, seminars and tutorials in Sanskrit, Pali and Indian religions as well as courses on manuscript reading and research history. He is the leader of the Śākta Traditions research project together with Prof. Gavin Flood and co-leader and founder of a research unit for South Asian Religion (SAR) and a student exchange programme at Aarhus University.

Research
The Study of Religion and Hindu Studies; Indian languages (esp. Sanskrit, Vedic and Pali); Śāktism and tantric traditions; The ascetic reformism (6th to 2nd century BC); Medieval India and Nepal; Yoga and asceticism; Myths and rituals; History of Ideas in South Asia; Theory and method, key thinkers and the history of research on religion.

Publications
His book publications include a translation of the Bhagavadgita (2009) and an introduction to Sanskrit in two volumes called Language of the Gods: Classical Sanskrit in Danish (2013). He is the editor of Goddess Traditions in Tantric Hinduism: History, Practice and Doctrine (Routledge, 2015) and co-author on a Danish standard introduction to Hinduism with a focus on Varanasi (Systime, 2015). He is currently working on a Danish translation of the Haṭhapradīpikā, an English translation and critical edition of the Netratantra together with Prof. Gavin Flood.

Email: bjarne.wernicke-olesen@theology.ox.ac.uk

Dr Kate Wharton

Dr Wharton has worked for three and a half years for the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as the deputy head advisor of Inter Religious Affairs. She studied Sanskrit in Mysore and is very interested in the theology of Ramanuja. Dr Wharton has also offered courses on Hindu and Buddhist Philosophy for Birkbeck College, London. She has organized a conference between Hindu and Christian leaders in Bangalore

Dr Ferdinando Sardella

Ferdinando is presently a researcher at Uppsala University where he is conducting research on the historical and contemporary globalization of Vaishnavism. He is also the director of the Forum for South Asian Studies for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the same university.He became a fellow of the OCHS in 2011 and is the coordinator of the OCHS project 'Bengal Vaishnavism in the Modern Period'.

Publications include:

• Modern Hindu Personalism: The History, Life, and Thought of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati - Oxford University Press (2012)

Dr Jessica Frazier

About
After degrees in the Study of Religions at King’s College, Cambridge and Wolfson College, Oxford, I did doctoral work at Queen’s College, Cambridge on the early modern Hindu thinker Rūpa Gosvāmin and the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Since then I continue to explore problems of Being and the Self, philosophy across cultures, and novel ways of understanding Value. I now work on religion more broadly with a special interest in Asia, and specifically on two philosophical traditions: classical to early modern Vedanta, and Post-Heideggerian Phenonenology. I am Managing Editor of the Journal of Hindu Studies (Oxford Journals), and an occasional contributor to BBC programmes. My current projects include books on Religion, Hinduism and the Sacred (Cambridge), and a philosophical exploration of the sublime in modern thought.  I also spend a large portion of my time in Asia and elsewhere, exploring other ways of seeing the world.  

Research
My interests in Indian thought include: Classical Hindu thought, Indian philosophical views on metaphysics, selfhood, and conceptions of aesthetics and value, Cla ssical Vedanta, early-modern Bhedabheda, Asian conceptions of the divine.

My research interests in Philosophy and Phenomenology include: Post-Heideggerian Philosophy, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, philosophies of Being and Ontology, Self and Identity, Value and Emotion.

Publications

• Hindu Worldviews: Theories of Self, Ritual and Reality(Bloomsbury 2016)
• The Bloomsbury Companion to Hindu Studies ([Continuum 2011] Bloomsbury 2014)
• Reality, Religion and Passion: Indian and Western Approaches in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Rupa Gosvami (Lexington Books, 2009)
• (Edited) Categorisation in Indian Philosophy: Thinking Inside the Box (Ashgate, 2014)

In Preparation: 

• Religion, Hinduism and the Sacred: Rethinking the Divine(Cambridge University Press 2019)
• An Introduction to Hindu Thought (Penguin Books 2020)
• The Sublime World: Gadamer on Truth, Beauty, Globalism

       Managing Editor

• The Journal of Hindu Studies, Founding and Managing Editor (Oxford Journals, 2008-)

      Chapters and Articles

• “Philosophy and Religion in India” in The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Indian Philosophy, Purushottama Bilimoria ed. London: Routledge, 2018.
• “Overflowing Selves: The Phenomenology of Possession in Hindu and Christian Contexts” in Mystical Theology: Eruptions from France, (Ashgate, 2015)
•  “Sacrifice as Value-Bestowal: From Slaughtered Lambs to Dedicated Lives“ in Sacrifice and Modern Thought, Meszaros and Zacchuber Eds. (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• “Hindu Visual Arts and Architecture” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts, Frank Burch Brown Ed. (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• “Atheism in Hindu Culture” in the Oxford Handbook of Atheism,Stephen Bullivant Ed. (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• “Natural Theology in Eastern Religions” in The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, Russell Re Manning Ed. (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Bridges and Barriers to Hindu-Christian Relations, (Hindu-Christian Forum of Britain, 2011).
• “Becoming the Goddess: Subjectivity in the Passion of the Goddess Rādhā” in New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion,Pamela Sue Anderson ed. (Springer, 2010)

Email: jfrazier@ochs.org.uk

Dr Kenneth Valpey

His dissertation was entitled The Grammar and Poetics of Murti-Seva: Caitanya Vaisnava Image Worship as Discourse, Ritual, and Narrative. 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. Having taught courses in Indian and Asian religions for the year 2006 at the University of Florida and throughout the academic year 2007-08 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, he currently continues to teach at CUHK each Autumn semester as a Visiting Scholar.
Publications include:

• Readings from the Bhagavata Purana (Co-authored with Ravi Gupta)
• Champion to the Bhagavata Purana ( Co-authored with Ravi Gupta)