The Endangered Archives Programme operates from the British Library with a dedicated team 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.
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 areas of the world. The Panel is chaired by the Head of the Endangered Archives Programme and the British Library provides one representative.
EAP Advisory Panel
Sergei Bogatyrev
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.
Mulaika Hijjas
Mulaika Hijjas is Senior Lecturer in South East Asian Studies at SOAS University of London, where she specialises in the Malay manuscript tradition and also teaches the literature and cultural studies of the region. She has a BA in Literature from Harvard College; an MPhil in Islamic history from Oxford; and a PhD in Malay literature from SOAS. She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2009-14. She has published numerous articles and a monograph (Victorious Wives: The Disguised Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Malay Syair, NUS Press, 2010), and was co-managing editor of Indonesia and the Malay World. She is principal investigator on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures’, which draws extensively on EAP material.
Lauren Leve
Lauren Leve is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religions at the University of North Carolina. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of religion, culture and changing forms of life in contemporary Nepal and South Asia. Trained as anthropologist, she studies the ways that religious practices and subjectivities are bound up in, mediate, and in turn are mediated by broader political, economic and social trends—particularly those associated with neoliberal globalization. She is also concerned with the ways that human agents use religion to reflect on the world as they know it, and as they wish it to be. Her recent publications include The Buddhist Art of Living in Nepal: Ethical Practice and Religious Reform (London: Routledge, 2016).
Buhle Mbambo-Thata
Buhle Mbambo-Thata is the University Librarian of the National University of Lesotho. She previously served as the Director- Resources Development of the African Library and Information Association and Institutions (AfLIA); Executive Director, Library Services, University of South Africa; University Librarian, University of Zimbabwe, and Senior Librarian, University of Botswana. She serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and a member of the board of directors of African Journals Online (AJOL). She served two terms as Governing Board member of IFLA. She has also served on boards of other Library and Information Service support organisations. Dr Mbambo-Thata's knowledge and expertise have been recognised through awards for service excellence and leadership. Her research interests are in Women and ICT, and library development in Africa.
Luisa Mengoni
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. Before joining the Library in 2018, Dr Mengoni worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) for ten years. 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 has taught on Chinese art and archaeology, cultural heritage and museology. Her recent publications focus on Chinese export art and Sino-European trade, collecting history, and cultural heritage.
Carlos Gálvez Peña
Carlos Gálvez-Peña is Professor of History at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (Lima). He specialises in Early Colonial Peruvian History with a focus on the production of historical discourse in Seventeenth-Century Spanish America, political representation of Colonial Elites and the impact of Early Modern Theories of Catholic Statecraft on Colonial Governance. Galvez-Peña has also taught Latin American Colonial History at the Universidad del Pacífico (Lima) and was Visiting Assistant Professor of Colonial Latin American History at the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia) in 2011/12. He is a member of the Instituto Riva-Agüero PUCP (Lima, Peru) and the Renaissance Society of America.
Hana Sleiman
Hana Sleiman is a Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Edinburgh. She researches the history of historiography in the Levant, with a focus on archive building and record keeping in the twentieth century. She earned a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge (2021) and an MA in Middle East Studies from Columbia University (2013). 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.
Endangered Archives Programme Staff
Head of the Endangered Archives Programme
Sam van Schaik provides strategic leadership and direction and represents the Programme inside and outside the British Library.
Programme Manager
Ruth Hansford manages the annual funding round and the portfolio of live grants.
Lead Curator
Jody Butterworth is responsible for the EAP digital collections at the British Library, advising projects and ensuring the quality and discoverability of the collections.
Cataloguer
Carmen Masardo is responsible for cataloguing and ingesting metadata from EAP projects.
Grants Assistant
Mae Erzini Vernoit supports the management of the funding round and the live grants.
International Office Liaison
Laura Carderera is based at the British Library's International Office and works with the EAP team on the Regional Hubs project.
