Academic Staff in the Study of Religions
Dr Brendan McNamara
Brendan McNamara is an historian of religions focussing on 'East-West' encounters at the turn of the 20th century. His interests also include the history of the Bahá'í Faith, the religious landscape in Ireland before independence, and the contribution of Irish scholar administrators to the production of knowledge around religions in colonial India. His publications include:
The Reception of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Britain; East comes West, Leiden: Brill, 2021.
The Study of Religions in Ireland; Past, Present and Future, (Editor with Hazel O'Brien), London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Dr Danny Forde
Dr Danny Forde is a philosopher specialising in realist phenomenology, religious experience and the psychedelic experience. He has presented his work at the INSIGHT conference in Berlin, UCD, the British Society for Phenomenology and the Irish Philosophical Society, amongst others. His interests include Platonism, Spinozism, psychotherapy and the philosophy of martial arts.
Marilena Frisone
Marilena Frisone is a social anthropologist who is currently working as assistant lecturer in the Study of Religions Department, UCC. She has taught at UCC in modules on Indigenous Religions, Hinduism and Indian Religions, Introduction to Asian Studies, and within the MA programme in Anthropology. She has conducted fieldwork in Nepal, researching on Nepalese followers of Japanese New Religions and focusing on religious conversion, ritual, and medical pluralism. More recently she has also conducted fieldwork among Newar communities in London, researching on language revitalisation, heritage, and food practices in the diaspora.
Robyn McAuliffe
Robyn McAuliffe is a PhD student in UCC’s School of English. Having completed a BA in English in University College Cork in 2020, Robyn was awarded a CACSSS Excellence Masters Scholarship and completed a Masters by Research in 2021. During her undergraduate, Robyn was awarded the Louise Clancy Memorial Prize for her undergraduate dissertation on the use of rape as a literary device in Old English hagiography. She is currently the OMR officer for UCC’s English Literature Society and the organiser of UCC’s Inkwell: Medieval to Renaissance Symposium.
Visiting and Emeritus Professors
Dr Tatiana Vagramenko
Dr Tatiana Vagramenko is Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Cork. She is a Principal Investigator in the SFI-IRC Pathway-funded project “History Declassified: The KGB and the Religious Underground in Soviet Ukraine” (2022-2026) and in the British Library EAP project “Religious Minorities Archives and the War in Ukraine” (2023-2024). She has held postdoctoral appointments at University of Barcelona in Spain, Imre Kertesz Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University in Germany, and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Maynooth University in 2014. Vagramenko’s research is focused on the history and memory of state repression and cultural opposition in Soviet Ukraine, based on in-depth reconsideration of recently opened Soviet-era secret police (former KGB) archives in Ukraine.
