Our Fellows

Combe Trust Fellow, September 2022-February 2023. Project: The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Galicia (1946–1968): Strategies of Survival and Resistance in the Underground

During the Second World War, the West Ukrainian region of Eastern Galicia became a part of the Soviet Union. In 1946, the Greek Catholic Church, which was the Church of most Ukrainians in the region, was officially abolished through its allegedly voluntary “reunion” with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Under state pressure, the majority of Greek Catholic clergymen and laypeople “reunited” with the ROC. Nonetheless, most monks and nuns as well as a part of the Greek Catholic clergy and believers refused to change the Church’s jurisdiction.

The study mainly focuses on the strategies of survival and resistance employed by the Ukrainian Greek Catholics who refused to join the ROC and professed their faith clandestinely. First, the research looks at the strategies of their survival in Soviet society, including participation of young Greek Catholics in the Communist organizations and the clandestine clergy’s secular work. Concealment of faith or hiding one’s Greek Catholic identity offer a vivid example of how theology was influenced by the security context. Second, the proposed study deals with the Greek Catholics’ strategies of resistance, ranging from legal forms of protest to outright confrontation of believers with the representatives of Soviet authorities, including agents of the state security service, the KGB. By using the above survival and resistance strategies, clandestine Greek Catholics were able to preserve their denominational identity in a hostile environment up to 1990, when the UGCC was finally legalised.

Dr Kateryna Budz is a scholar specialising in the history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) in the 20th century. She holds a PhD in History from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (2016), having completed her BA and MA studies at the same university. During the academic year 2012-2013, Kateryna Budz was a Black Sea Link Fellow at the New Europe College (Bucharest, Romania). In September-December 2014, she pursued her research as an exchange student at the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (Toronto, Canada), and from January to October 2015 she was a DAAD Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale, Germany). Her doctoral project looked at the strategies of survival and resistance employed by the clandestine Greek Catholics in the Soviet Union after official abolition of the UGCC in Galicia in 1946. During her stay at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Budz will work on turning her doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript.

Combe Trust Fellow, September 2021-November 2021. Project: The Theater of Canonization: The Making of Jesuit Saints in Late Imperial China

During the eighteenth century, the European enterprise of admiring China as a “more enlightened” analogue of the West was chiefly propelled by court Jesuits in Beijing and appropriated by Enlightenment intellectuals such as Voltaire and Leibniz. After the conclusion of the Boxer Uprising in 1900, this Western attempt to represent China as both a perfect fit with Christianity (Jesuits) and conversely a non-Christian alternative to the West (French Philosophes) had translated into a missionary effort to appreciate only a Christianized Asia. Sino-Western conflicts such as the Opium War (1839-1842) supplanted the Enlightenment imagination of an Asian “philosopher king” and replaced it with Western ambitions to transform China into a Westernized and Christianized empire. This project traces the evolution of the West’s imagination of China from the theatrical Jesuit valorizations of the early Qing (1644-1911) to the Jesuit mission in China during the late Qing that employed the celebration and canonization of Boxer era Christian martyrs to “canonize China” as an East Asian terra sancta (holy land) that was to be transformed into a “civilized” entrepot of Western culture and commodities.

Anthony Clark is professor of Chinese history, the Edward B. Lindaman Endowed Chair at Whitworth University, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has studied languages and cultural history at Minzu University of China (Beijing), Taipei Language Institute (Taipei), National Taiwan Normal University (Taipei), and Alliance Française (Paris). Clark has been a recipient of several awards to conduct his research on Christianity in China, including year-long grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, the William J. Fulbright Foundation, the David L. Boren Fellowship, the Vincentian Studies Institute Grant, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar’s Grant. Clark has published several scholarly books, including: Ban Gu’s History of Early China (2008); China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom During the Qing (2010); Beating Devils and Burning Their Books: Views of China, Japan, and the West (2010): Zhonghua Tianzhujiao xundao jianshi 中華天主教殉道簡史 [A Concise History of Catholic Martyrdom in China] (2013); A Voluntary Exile: Chinese Christianity and Cultural Confluence since 1552 (2014); Heaven in Conflict: Franciscans and the Boxer Uprising in Shanxi (2015); China’s Christianity: From Missionary to Indigenous Church (2017); China Gothic: The Bishop of Beijing and His Cathedral (2019); China’s Catholics in an Era of Transformation: Observations of an “Outsider” (2020); A Chinese Jesuit Catechism: Giulio Aleni’s Four Character Classic 四字經文 (2021).

Combe Trust Fellow, September 2020-November 2020. Project: Gender-critical perspectives on interreligious dialogue for peacebuilding in the Balkans

Ina Merdjanova is Visiting Professor at Coventry University’s Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations & Senior Researcher and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin. She has held visiting fellowships at Oxford University, New York University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Aleksanteri Institute at Helsinki University, among others. She is author of five books and numerous articles on religion and politics in post-communist society. Her publications include Religion as a Conversation Starter: Interreligious Dialogue for Peacebuilding in the Balkans (with Patrice Brodeur; Continuum, 2009, paperback 2011), Rediscovering the Umma: Muslims in the Balkans between Nationalism and Transnationalism (Oxford University Press, 2013, paperback 2016), and an edited volume Women and Religiosity in Orthodox Christian Contexts (forthcoming with Fordham University Press, 2021).