Who's Who

International Advisory Panel

The awarding of grants is undertaken on behalf of Arcadia by an International Advisory Panel comprising eight members, six of whom are academics and archivists representing different disciplines and/or areas of the world. The Panel is chaired by the Principal Adviser to Arcadia and the British Library provides one representative.

Sergei Bogatyrev - University College London

Sergei Bogatyrev is an Associate Professor at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He holds degrees in history and archival studies. Sergei has worked for the Central Archive of Ancient Records and the Central Archive of the National Economy, both in Moscow, Russia, and for the National Library in Helsinki, Finland. His research interests lie in the history of Muscovite Russia (15th-17th centuries), book culture, and technology transfer. He is the author of The Sovereign and His Counsellors (2000), editor of Russia Takes Shape: Patterns of Integration from the Middle Ages to the Present (2004); Ivan Vasil'evich Receives a Profession: Studies of Ivan the Terrible in Post-Soviet Russia (2014); and co-editor of History and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia (2013). In 2014-2017, Sergei was the principal investigator in a collaborative project with the British Library on early Cyrillic printing, including an international conference and the digitalisation of a rare book from the Library’s holdings. Sergei edited the proceedings of the conference, The Journeys of Ivan Fedorov: New Perspectives on Early Cyrillic Printing (2017). His contribution to the proceedings on ‘The Patronage of Early Printing in Moscow’ received an Honorable Mention for the 2017 Article Prize by the Early Slavic Studies Association. Sergei was granted a core fellowship by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in 2014-15. He is on the editorial boards of several academic journals and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Oman Fathurahman - Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta

Oman Fathurahman is Professor of Philology at the Faculty of Adab and Humanities, Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta, and senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Islam and Society, or Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat (PPIM). His major scholarly interest is Indonesian Islamic manuscripts studies, especially those in Arabic and Malay. His publications include: Ithaf al-dhaki by Ibrahim al-Kurani: A Commentary of Wahdat al-wujud for Jawi Audiences. Archipel 81 (2011), pp. 177-198 and Tarekat Syatariyah di Minangkabau [Syattariyah Sufi Order in Minangkabau], Jakarta: Prenada & EFEO, 2008. He has also been involved in compiling catalogues of Indonesian manuscripts, namely: Aceh Manuscripts: Dayah Tanoh Abee Collection [ed. 2010], Catalogue of Aceh Manuscripts: Ali Hasjmy's Collection [with Munawar Holil, 2007], and Khazanah Naskah: Panduan Koleksi Naskah Indonesia Sedunia (World Guide to the Indonesian Manuscript Collections) [with Henri Chambert-Loir, 1999), and kitab catalogue A Provisional Catalogue of Southeast Asian Kitabs of Sophia University. (Second Version). Tokyo: Institute of Asian Cultures – Center for Islamic studies, Sophia University [with Kawashima Midori and others, 2015]. He is Managing Editor of Studia Islamika, the peer-reviewed Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies. His latest academic publication is Shattariyah Silsilah in Aceh, Java and the Lanao Area of Mindanao (Tokyo: ILCAA-TUFS, 2016), and his current research is on Female Indonesian Sufis: with Special Reference to the 18th and 19th Centuries of Java.

Rajeev Kinra - Northwestern University, Illinois

Rajeev Kinra (PhD, University of Chicago, 2008) is a cultural historian of early modern South Asia, with a special emphasis on the literary, intellectual, religious, and political cultures of the Mughal and early British Empires in India (~16th-19th centuries). His research draws on several linguistic traditions (especially Persian, but also Hindi-Urdu and Sanskrit), to examine diverse modes of civility, tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and cultural modernity across the Indo-Persian and Indian Ocean worlds. Many of these themes are also explored in his recent book on the life, Persian writings, and cultural-historical milieu of the celebrated Mughal state secretary and poet, Chandar Bhan “Brahman” (d. ~1670), Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary (University of California Press, 2015), part of the award-winning "South Asia Across the Disciplines" series. Kinra has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2010-11), and most recently a "Big Ideas" grant from Northwestern's Buffett Institute for Global Studies to launch (with co-director Laura Brueck) a new Global Humanities Initiative. Kinra is a member of the international research group Perso-Indica, and serves on the advisory board, or Collegium, for the Berlin-based research project known as Zukunftsphilologie [Future Philology]: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship, as well as the editorial board for the journal Philological Encounters. He also serves on the academic council for the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). Kinra currently serves as the Director of Northwestern's Asian Studies Program (ASP) (2015-18), and co-director of Northwestern's Global Humanities Initiative (GHI). He is also an affiliated member and/or serves on the advisory committees of several other departments and programmes.

Luisa Mengoni - British Library

Luisa Elena Mengoni is Head of Asian & African Collections at the British Library. She is responsible for the curation, management and promotion of the Library's collections from all over Asia and Africa, including items in manuscript, printed and digital form in more than 300 languages, and associated digitisation and research projects. She is also responsible for the Visual Arts section, which includes prints, drawings, photographs and works of art from the India Office, as well as the Library’s public art collection. Her team is made up of six curatorial areas: African Collections, Middle East and Central Asian Collections, South Asian Collections, Visual Arts, South East Asian Collections and East Asian Collections. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is also part of the AAC Department. Before joining the Library in 2018, Dr Mengoni worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) for ten years, first as Curator of Chinese collections, contributing to major gallery and exhibition projects in London and in China. From 2014 to 2017 she was seconded to Shenzhen as Head of the V&A Gallery at Design Society to oversee the opening of a new space and all components of the collaboration with China Merchants Shekou. Holding a degree in Chinese Studies from Università degli Studi L’Orientale (Napoli) and a PhD in Chinese Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, London, she taught on Chinese art and archaeology, cultural heritage and museology at the V&A, UCL, SOAS, Christie’s Education and Sotheby’s Institute. Her recent publications focus on Chinese export art and Sino-European trade, collecting history, and cultural heritage.

Nathan Mnjama - University of Botswana

Nathan Mnjama is a Professor in the Department of Library and Information Studies, University of Botswana with specialisation in Archives and Records Management. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in History from the University of Nairobi, a Postgraduate Diploma in Archives and Records Management from the University of Ghana, a Postgraduate Diploma in History from Girton College, Cambridge and a PhD in Archival Studies from University College, London. His PhD was on Railway Records: Their Management and Exploitation in Kenya. Professor Mnjama has worked as an archivist and records manager at the Kenya National Archives and was responsible for the location and copying of Kenyan archives from the UK between 1980 and 1985. He has considerable experience in the teaching and delivery of archives and records management programmes having lectured at the School of Information Sciences, Moi University Kenya, and since 1996 at the Department of Library and Information Studies University of Botswana where he has been instrumental in the design of archives and records management programmes. Professor Mnjama is a well known speaker and presenter in archives and records management forums in East and Southern Africa, and he has written extensively in the field of archives and records management in Africa. Mnjama has participated in several records management initiatives organised by the International Records Management Trust aimed at improving archives and record-keeping practices in Africa.

Caterina Pizzigoni - Columbia University

Caterina Pizzigoni is Associate Professor of Latin American History at Columbia University. Her research interests include indigenous populations in colonial Latin America, particularly Mexico and the study of sources in Nahuatl (indigenous language of central Mexico), social history, religion, gender, household and material culture. She has published two books, The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico's Toluca Valley, 1650-1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); and Testaments of Toluca (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); and articles in journals and edited volumes. Her current book project examines the images of saints in colonial Mexican households, 16th-18th centuries, combining a thorough study of both the indigenous and Spanish worlds. The statues, paintings, and prints present in the houses are considered not only from the perspective of religious history but also from that of material culture, of saints as objects, at the same time focusing on social practices involving them. Pizzigoni holds an MA from the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London (1998) and a PhD from King’s College London (2002). Before moving to New York City, she held a post-doctorate at ILAS, and then a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London.

Hana Sleiman - Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

Hana Sleiman is an archivist and a historian of the modern Middle East whose research focuses on intellectual history, histories of print and archive theory. She is a Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and an Affiliate Researcher with the Arab Oral History Archive: Gender, Alternative Histories and the Production of Knowledge project at the American University of Beirut. Her PhD dissertation, under completion at the University of Cambridge, is titled History Writing and History Making in Twentieth-Century Beirut. She earned an MA from Columbia University (2013) working on archive creation and appropriation in modern Palestinian history. Her work has been published in the Arab Studies Journal and the Journal for Palestine Studies, and exhibited at the Qalandiya International biennale, Beirut. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Cambridge Trust, the Constantine Zurayq Cultural Foundation, the German Orient Institute Beirut and the Princeton University Library. Her archival work focuses on devising open tools and methodologies for ephemera and oral history archives, and she is the co-founder of the open source MASRAD:platform for archiving oral history. Previously, she was the Special Collections Librarian at the American University of Beirut Archives (2014 – 2016), working on the Constantine Zurayk personal papers and co-leading the Palestinian Oral History Archive. In the past, she has consulted with the Archive of the Missing and Disappeared in Lebanon, the Syrian Oral History Archive and the Institute for Palestine Studies Library.

 

Endangered Archives Programme Staff

The Endangered Archives Programme is administered by the British Library which is responsible for managing and monitoring the research grant scheme, ensuring the material digitised through the programme is consistently catalogued and discoverable online, and promoting the collections with the academic community and general users everywhere, for purposes of research, inspiration and enjoyment. These are the members of the team in London.

Head of EAP - Sam van Schaik

Sam provides strategic leadership and direction and represents the Programme inside and outside the British Library.

Grants Manager - Ruth Hansford

Ruth manages the annual competition and the portfolio of live grants.

Curator - Jody Butterworth

Jody ensures consistency, quality and discoverability of the digitised collections.

Cataloguing and Systems Lead - Rob Miles

As well as cataloguing the content, Robert also looks after the interface between the BL catalogue and the online collections.

Cataloguer - Graham Jevon

Graham is developing new processes for metadata creation.

International Office Liaison - Shezza Rashwan

Shezza is focusing on training for applicants and grant holders.