Who's Who

EAP 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 Head of the Endangered Archives Programme 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.

Mulaika Hijjas - SOAS University of London

Dr 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.

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.

Buhle Mbambo-Thata - University of Lesotho

Dr 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 - 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.

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 at the American University of Beirut. She earned a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge (2021) and an MA in Middle East Studies from Columbia University (2013). 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 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.

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.

Programme Manager - Ruth Hansford

Ruth manages the annual funding round and the portfolio of live grants.

Lead Curator - Jody Butterworth

Jody 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

Carmen is responsible for cataloguing and ingesting metadata from EAP projects.

Grants Assistant - Catherine Smith

Catherine supports the management of the funding round and the live grants.

International Office Liaison - Laura Carderera

Laura works with the EAP team on the regional hubs project.