Meg Barker
Area Coordinator for: philosophy, psychology, feminist studies, social studies
Meg has lectured in psychology at Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education for the past three years. She has recently taken a new post at University College in Gloucester. She teaches students at a range of levels and has an interdisciplinary approach. She particularly enjoys teaching gender issues and qualitative methods. Meg's PhD, at Nottingham University, investigated student loneliness, and she has published in this area. Since then, she has maintained research interests in emotions, whilst also branching out into other areas. At present, she is researching in two areas: the origin of beliefs in Wicca and witchcraft, and representations of evil in urban mythology, fiction, and popular psychology. Meg also writes crime and horror fiction, and hopes to be published soon. She lives in Worcester with Darren Oldridge, and their two cats.

Paul Davies
Coordinator for the media reviews section (inc. film, tv, art, music, radio, internet)
Paul graduated from Leicester University in 1980 with a BH Hons. in German with French as subsidiary before going to Canada to do postgraduate work in German literature. In 1981 he received an MA from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba and in 1986 a PhD from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. After gaining a certificate in teaching English as a foreign language from the TESOL centre at Sheffield University, Paul then spent three years at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada teaching German and English. Since 1991 he has been working as an English instructor at Passau University, Germany, teaching courses in essay writing, translation, and English-language cinema. Paul's main research interest is film, and he has presented several talks on a variety of film-related topics.

Rob Fisher
Consulting Editor
Rob is interested in all aspects of evil, suffering, pain, illness, disease, death, holocaust and genocide. As the former Head of Theology and Principal Lecturer in Philosophy, Theology, and Theodicy at Westminster College, Oxford, he became known as the source of all suffering in the College! His research in the area of Philosophical Theology led to his D.Phil dissertation at the University of Oxford entitled: ‘The World and God: A Theology of Persons in Relationship'. The title underlies his other main area of interest - persons. He is the founder of the Global Association for the Study of Persons, a member of the Steering Committee for the International Forum on Persons, and on the Advisory Board for Essays in Philosophy, and the Communitarian Forum. He is also Series Editor of Personalist Studies, and has published books on Becoming Persons, and Persons, Suffering, and Death. He presently runs his own company - Learning Solutions - and is an educational consultant for OCR. He is married to Fiona and has three children, three cats, and a fanatical interest in science fiction, Star Trek and American Football!

Neil Forsyth
Coordinator for Literature
Neil has finally settled down to become Professor of English at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. In his earlier life, he was surprisingly and perhaps inadvertently allowed to graduate from King's College, Cambridge, and also holds advanced degrees from the universities of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and California, Berkeley. In between he spent the summer of 1968 in London, Paris and Prague. Later, fed up with academic life and disgusted at Nixon's politics, he also tried to work his way round the world, but ended up in Japan, where he lived for several months before being summoned back to the real world. He is the author of The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, a forthcoming book on Milton called The Satanic Epic, as well as unpublishable poetry and more or less unreadable (but published) essays on such topics as trees and Gilgamesh, love in Homer, Shakespeare films, the devil in Milton, the body in Blake, coincidence in Dickens (and films), D.H.Lawence facing death, and families in Salman Rushdie. He is not married, but has two children who,. amazingly (really), bear the names of his parents, Alice and James.

Salwa Ghaly
Chief Co-Editor
Salwa earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Alberta, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation, which was entitled "Towards a Medieval Narratology," investigated how best to adapt modern theoretical approaches developed in discourse analysis, speech act theory and narratology to different medieval languages and literary traditions, including Old French and Middle English texts, with special emphasis on the works of Chretien de Troyes and Chaucer. She has published on Flamenca, the celebrated Provencal novella, as well as on the transition from orality to textuality and the author/narrator function in medieval narrative. More recently, she has turned her attention to postcolonial and women's literature. Her recent publications include articles on Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, Lawrence Durrell and Hanan Al-Shaykh. Salwa has taught English and comparative literature in Canada, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. She was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto for two years after which she joined the English Department/Cultural Studies Program at the American University of Beirut. Since 1998, she has been Assistant Professor at the University of Sharjah, UAE.

Jim Grove
Coordinator for Holocaust Studies and War Studies
Jim's interests are The Holocaust (he both teaches and has written about it), evil in contemporary American Literature, depictions of evil in American pop culture, evil in familial settings, the evil of racism, the Vietnam War, Southern American fiction, the World Wars, 20th Century British Fiction, and Czech Culture.

Diana Medlicott
Professions Coordinator: law, criminology, legal studies, prison service
Diana went into academia as a mature student after a career in publishing and four children. Whilst the latter slept, grew and astonished her, she trundled through an Honours degree in the social sciences at Middlesex University, England, a Masters degree in the history of political thought at the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in criminology at Middlesex University. All of this was enough to convince her of the value of inter-disciplinary study. She currently teaches and researches at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College in criminology, specialising in prisons, serious violent offenders and restorative justice approaches to crime. Her book, Surviving the Prison Place: Narratives of Suicidal Prisoners (Ashgate 2001) is a qualitative study of suicidal feelings in prison, analysed from the prisoner perspective. She is currently working on a book about profound change in prisoners who have committed dangerous violent crimes. For fun, however, she prefers literature and poetry.

Stephen Morris
Chief Co-Editor
Religious and Vocational Coordinator: theology, religious studies, genocide
Stephen is an independent scholar who works with early-medieval church history, patristics, and Byzantine/Slavic church materials. He has degrees from Yale, St.Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary (where he studied with both Fr. Alexander Schmemannand Fr. John Meyendorff), and Hunter (NYC). He is the former Eastern Orthodox Christian chaplain at Columbia University. He serves as an adjunct instructor at the New School for Social Research (NYC), the Learning Solutions Summer Institute in Prague, and he also teaches in a program for severe-profoundly developmentally disabled/ multiply handicapped students for the NYC Board of Ed.

Having grown up in Seattle, Washington, he always expected to live in New York one day and when he first saw Manhattan (freshman year, 1976) he exclaimed, "This is home! This is everything a city SHOULD be!" This love of The City was taken by his fellow theology students as proof of original sin: that someone could grow up in Seattle and still PREFER New York! Divorced, the father of two children, he currently resides in Manhattan with his domestic partner Elliot.

John T. Parry
Professions Coordinator: law, criminology, legal studies, prison service
John is assistant professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights Litigation, and related courses, and writes about police violence, criminal law defenses, and other topics. He graduated in 1986 from Princeton University, with a degree in history and a certificate from the Program in Creative Writing (a skill which came in handy during his career as a practicing lawyer). After working on the staff of U.S. Congressman Tom Sawyer, he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991. He was law clerk to the Honourable James R. Browning of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Prior to joining the Pitt faculty, he was an associate at the Washington, D.C. law firm Williams & Connolly and a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Susan Robbins
Book Reviews Coordinator
Susan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University. Her areas of specialisation are in Kant's moral philosophy, virtue ethics, and Christian philosophy. She has degrees from Temple University and Denver Seminary. She has taught philosophy to students at all levels from junior high through graduate school. She is also interested in applied philosophy and has been certified for philosophical counselling in private practice. She currently resides with her three cats in Catawissa, PA

Bill Wringe
Area Coordinator: politics, philosophy, psychology, social studies
Bill is a philosopher with interests in philosophy of mind, ethics and political philosophy. After studying at the universities of Oxford, Munich and St. Andrews he received a Ph.D. from Leeds University in June 2000. He now teaches political philosophy at the department of International Relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, having previously held temporary and part-time posts at several British universities.

His research is chiefly focussed on areas where philosophy (and in particular moral philosophy) overlaps with psychology. He is particularly interested in the question of whether human nature places any limits on our capacity to understand evil and if so what these limits might be. He is also the father of a two year-old daughter and has strong views on a number of subjects on which he is entirely unqualified to pronounce.