Dr. Elena Narinskaya is the Spalding Research Fellow in Comparative Religion at Cambridge University. Her main research interest lies is in the area of Scriptural studies / Biblical exegesis within the context
of three monotheistic religions, i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Islam. She has previously worked with
early Jewish-Christian interpretations of Exodus in the fourth century Syria and Palestine, and
published her first book on the basis of her PhD in 2010. Since then she started researching the Qur’anic
presentation of the Exodus stories. She recently submitted her third monograph to Rutledge on the
stories of Moses in Jewish, Christian and Muslim sources. She studied Judaism and Hebrew in Jerusalem in 1999-2000, followed by completion of an
MA programme at the Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge in 2002. She also studied
Syriac language and Syriac Christian tradition of biblical exegesis in Cambridge. At Durham
University she completed her Doctorate in Biblical Exegesis in Syria and Palestine in 2007, which was
followed by Post-Doctoral Licentiate in Divinity from the University of Wales, Lampeter (2008-
2011). She also studied Arabic and Tafsir Qur’an at Durham University and in Alexandria, Egypt. In
2012-2015 she held a research position at the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies in Oxford where she worked on her third monograph. For the academic year of 2015-2016 she moved to Dublin City
University in Ireland where she worked on creating the Centre for Interreligious Dialogue. From
October 2017-Aug 2018 she was working on her fourth monograph at Clare Hall, Cambridge
University as the Spalding Research Fellow. For the academic year, 2017/18 she was
invited to Ruhr-Universität Bochum as an academic research fellow. Since December 2018 she has been an Associate Member of Theology Department at the University of Oxford.
The Rev. Dr. Gabrielle Thomas is Assistant Professor of Early Christianity and Anglican Studies at Emory University. In addition to authoring a significant number of journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, she has published three books: The Image of God in the Theology of Gregory Nazianzus (monograph, Cambridge, 2019), Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice (co-edited, Cascade, 2020), and For the Good of the Church: Unity, Theology and Women (monograph, SCM Press, 2021). An ordained priest in the Church of England, she has served churches as both a lay and an ordained leader. As a committed ecumenist she serves on the Anglican and Oriental Orthodox International Commission.