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Project Team
Our project team is located in the School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham
Yujin Nagasawa
Project Leader
H.G. Wood Professor of the Philosophy of Religion
Co-Director of the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion
Yujin Nagasawa is Project Leader of the Global Philosophy of Religion Project and Co-Director of the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2004. From 2004 to 2005 he was Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta, Canada and Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at ANU. He is the author of many books including Maximal God: A New Defence of Perfect Being Theism (OUP 2017), Miracles: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2017) and God and Phenomenal Consciousness: A Novel Approach to Knowledge Arguments (CUP 2008). He is the editor of Religious Studies and Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Religion. He is also a former president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. His areas of research interests include philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind and applied philosophy.
Rabab Anjum
Project Administrator
Rabab Anjum is a graduate in mathematics and is qualified as a management accountant with CIMA-III. She brings a wealth of experience working as a management accountant in NHS and private practice. Before jointing our project, she served for eight years as a research accountant in the research finance team at the University of Birmingham working for many schools (MDS, CAL, LES and COSS). She has managed large, complex projects worth multi-million pounds funding numerous partners and processing many sub-contracts. She is well versed with the financial management of project grants from such funding bodies as the UKRI, Leverhulme, CRUK, Bloodwise, Innovate, NIHR and universities in Europe as well as such pharmaceutical companies as AstraZeneca, GSK and Pfizer advising budget holders in the best use of resources. She is proficient in software like Oracle, BusinessObjects, Worktribe and Sage 50. She has also been extensively involved in internal and external audits. She has established strong business partnerships with internal and external stakeholders. In her spare time she loves walking and engaging with her local community.
Martin Pickup
Project Researcher
Martin Pickup received his DPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford in 2012. Before coming to Birmingham he was Turpin Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford and Stipendary Lecturer in Philosophy at Madgalen College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous papers, including 'The Stuationalist Account of Change' (Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, forhtcoming), for which he won the 2020 Saunders Prize in Metaphysics, 'Answers to Prayers: The Unsolved but Solvable Problem of Petitionary Prayer' (Faith and Philosophy, 2018) and 'Real Presence in the Eucharist and Time Travel' (Religious Studies, 2015). His areas of research interests are philosophy of religion, metaphysics and early modern philosophy.
Bakinaz Abdalla
Project Researcher
Bakinaz Abdalla received her Ph.D. in Jewish Studies at McGill University in 2019. Before coming to Birmingham she was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Hamburg and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. She is the author of One Truth or Two? Jewish Averroists on the Truth of the Philosophers and the Truth of the Prophets: the Case of Isaac Albalag (contracted with Brill) and 'Isaac Albalag' (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, forthcoming). Her areas of research interests include Jewish philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Sufism, Qur'anic Studies and Digital Humanities.
Abbas Ahsan
Project Researcher
Abbas Ahsan received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham in 2021. His doctoral research focused on the application of dialetheism, paraconsistent logics, and formal theories of truth to Islamic theological paradoxes. He is currently guest editing a special issue entitled Interactions between analytic and Islamic philosophy/theology (European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, forthcoming). His recent publications include 'Beyond the Categories of Truth, Islamic Contradictory Theology . . . Is there any such thing?', and 'Islamic Mystical Dialetheism: Resolving the Paradox of God’s Unknowability and Ineffability'. His areas of research interests are philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, Islamic philosophy of religion, and analytic Islamic theology.
Marie-Hélène Gorisse
Project Researcher
Marie-Hélène Gorisse received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Lille in 2011. Before coming to Birmingham, she was a Guest Professor at Ghent university (2021), a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS (2016-7; 19-20) and Postdoctoral Researcher at Leiden (2016) and Ghent (2012-15; 2018-21). She is the author of many papers, including 'Logic in the Tradition of Prabhācandra', 'Characterising the Self: Knowledge and Liberation in the Samayasāra' and 'Jain Conceptions of Authority in Samantabhadra's Āptamīmāṃsā'. She has also edited Puṣpikā: Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions. She specialises in Jainism and in the way its epistemology and hermeneutics are developed in dialogue with other South Asian philosophico-religious traditions. She also works on the contemporary relevance of Jainism as a contributor to global philosophy of religion.
Marie-Hélène Gorisse
Project Researcher
Marie-Hélène Gorisse received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Lille in 2011. Before coming to Birmingham, she was a Guest Professor at Ghent university (2021), a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS (2016-7; 19-20), and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Leiden (2016) and Ghent (2012-15; 2018-21). She is the author of many papers, including 'Logic in the tradition of Prabhācandra', 'Characterising the Self: Knowledge and liberation in the Samayasāra' and 'Jain conceptions of authority in Samantabhadra's Āptamīmāṃsā'. She has also edited such volumes as Puṣpikā: Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions. She specialises in Jainism and in the way its epistemology and hermeneutics developed in dialogue with other South Asian philosophico-religious traditions. She also works on the contemporary relevance of Jainism as a contributor to global philosophy and global philosophy of religion.
Mohsen Moghri
Project Researcher
Mohsen Moghri received his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science at the Sharif University of Technology, Iran in 2020. His doctoral research focused on Leibniz's question, 'Why is there anything at all?', and resulted in a number of interdisciplinary publications, including an article in Philosophia ('Deriving Actuality from Possibility') and another in KRITERION ('Much Ado About Nothingness?'). In 2021, he was a junior researcher at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Iran. Mohsen is currently working on a monograph, on how value grounds Nature as well as itself and also aims to work on the contemporary relevance of Religious Naturalism as a contributor to the global philosophy of religion. Mohsen's areas of research interests include metaphysics, analytic philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and the relationship between science and religion. His two-year research project is funded by the European Commission.
Nataliia Reva
Project Researcher
Nataliia Reva received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine in 2021. Her doctoral research focused on the intersection between the philosophy of logic and cognitive science. Before coming to Birmingham, she was awarded a JESH Scholarship by the Austrian Academy of Science and spent two months as a Visiting Researcher in the Research Centre of Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society at the University of Vienna. During her Ph.D studies she was also a member of the Oral History of Philosophy Society at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. It resulted in two SCOPUS articles (in Ukrainian) addressing the idea of using interviews as a method of philosophical research in practice. She speaks five languages: Ukrainian, English, French, Spanish and Russian. Her areas of research interests are philosophy of religion, informal logic and critical thinking and cognitive science.
Narmin Ismayilova
Project Administrator
Narmin Ismayilova is a final-year PhD researcher in archaeology at the University of Birmingham. Her PhD focuses broadly on the archaeology of the Caucasus region during the Early Bronze Age, especially exploring social organisation, cultural identity, social space, and diversity within pre-historic societies. She is the founder of the ‘Caucasus Through Time Network’, which is an inter-disciplinary research network for early career researchers working in the areas of Archaeology, Anthropology, History and Art History of the Caucasus region. She has a long-standing interest in public engagement, culture and heritage, which has led her to take part in various projects, such as ‘Birmingham Quran Digital exhibition’, ‘Green Heart Festival’, ‘Dippy on Tour’. She has also been involved in several university-led projects, such as ‘Birmingham Project’, ‘Sprint Forward’. She holds a BA and MA in 'Persian Studies (Language, Culture, Literature and History)' from the Baku State University.
Jonathan Duquette
Associate Member (Formerly Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Hindu Philosophy of Religion)
Jonathan Duquette received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of Montreal in 2011. Before coming to Birmingham he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Hamburg (2012-13), Leiden (2013-14), Kyoto (2014-15) and Oxford (2015-2019, as a Newton International Fellow and then Marie-Curie Fellow). He was also twice a visiting researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. He is the author of Defending God in Sixteenth-Century India: The Saiva Oeuvre of Appaya Diksita (contracted with OUP). He is also the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Indian Philosophy. Trained initially as a physicist, Duquette also nourishes an interest in the dialogue between natural sciences and religions as well as for recent developments in philosophy of science and comparative philosophy. His areas of research interests include philosophy of religion, classical Indian philosophy, devotional religion in India, Sanskrit intellectual history and comparative philosophy. His most recent book Defending God in Sixteenth-Century India: The Śaiva Oeuvre of Appaya Dīkṣita was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
Mohammad Saleh Zarepour
Associate Member (Formerly Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Islamic Philosophy of Religion)
Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Manchester
Mohammad Saleh Zarepour received his PhD in Philosophy at Tarbiat Modares University, Iran in 2015 and PhD in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2019. Before coming to Birmingham he was a Humboldt Postdoctoral Researcher at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is the author of Necessary Existence and Monotheism: An Avicennian Account of the Islamic Conception of Divine Unity (contracted with CUP) and co-editor of Mathematics, Logic and Their Philosophies (Springer, forthcoming). His areas of research interests are medieval Islamic philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of logic and mathematics, and philosophy of language.