Lecturer, Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University Yee-Fui researches in the areas of political integrity and the law, as well as the interaction between public law and politics. She is particularly interested in the influences on the contemporary Executive, such as ministerial advisers, the media and lobby groups, which has led to reactive government decision-making and policy-making. She has conducted commissioned research in multidisciplinary teams on local government democracy, the regulation of political lobbying, as well as parliamentary integrity systems. Yee-Fui was awarded the Monash Silver Jubilee Postgraduate Research Scholarship, as the highest ranking PhD applicant in the University, as well as the Monash Postgraduate Law Dean's Award, as the top-ranking PhD applicant in the Monash Law Faculty. Her forthcoming book 'Ministerial Advisers in Australia: The Modern Legal Context' will be published by Federation Press as a finalist for the Holt Prize. Dr Ng is a Victorian Convenor of the Electoral Regulation Research Network. She has previously worked as a Policy Adviser at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, a Senior Legal Adviser at the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet, as well as a Manager at the Victorian Department of Justice. Yee-Fui has also practised as a solicitor at top tier law firms in Melbourne, London and Canberra. She has researched and taught at the Australian National University and Monash University.
Professor of the History of the Church, University of Oxford Diarmaid MacCulloch holds a Cambridge doctorate in History, an Oxford Postgraduate Diploma in Theology and an Oxford Doctorate of Divinity. He is a Fellow and current Vice-President of the British Academy. His new book All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation is being published in July. He has written extensively on Tudor England; his biography Thomas Cranmer: a Life (Yale UP, 1996) won the Whitbread Biography, Duff Cooper and James Tait Black Prizes. More recent publications from Penguin/Allen Lane have included Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (appearing in the USA as The Reformation: a History), and A History of Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years (in the USA, Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years), which won the 2010 Cundill Prize; his latest book is Silence: a Christian History. He was the presenter on BBC4 and BBC2 of "A History of Christianity - the first 3,000 years", which won the Radio Times Listeners' Award in 2010, "How God made the English" (BBC2, 2012) and "Henry VIII's fixer: the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell" (BBC2, 2013); his BBC2 series Sex and the West aired in spring 2015. He received a knighthood in January 2012 for services to scholarship.
Clinical Psychologist and Research Fellow, University of Nottingham D Clin Psy, Master of Public Health, MA Psychology Adult Mental Health work for 7 years in the NHS and private care Researcher in Implementation science and healthcare research; moving to Nottingham Trent University in June 2016 to join the Centre for Children, Young People and Families (http://www.ntu.ac.uk/soc/collaborative_working/nccypf/index.html) Blogger for http://www.thementalelf.net
Professor in the Department of Economics, UCL Ian Preston is Professor in the Department of Economics at University College London. He received his D.Phil in Economics from Nuffield College, Oxford in 1989. He is a Research Fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and is Deputy Research Director of the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at UCL. He has been the Editor of the Economic Journal Conference Volume and the Editor of Fiscal Studies. His main research interests are in applied microeconomics, particularly consumer demand, consumption and savings, income distribution, taxation, public spending and child costs, political economy and the economics of sport. His interests in the economics of migration concern especially the impact on receiving countries and the nature of attitudes towards immigrants.
Lecturer in International Relations, Loughborough University Taku Tamaki is a Lecturer in International Relations, specialising in the international political dynamics of the Asia-Pacific region. After gaining his PhD at Aberystwyth, he was Research Fellow at the Institute of Asian Cultural Studies at International Christian University in Tokyo, and taught International Relations at Plymouth before moving to Loughborough in 2007. He has taught a wide range of courses on international politics and international political economy, including International Relations Theory, the United Nations and International Organisations, The Asia-Pacific in Global Politics, and the International Political Economy of the Asia-Pacific Region. Having spent four years as a US Treasuries broker at Cantor Fitzgerald (Tokyo office), he brings first-hand experience of political economy to the classroom, having experienced the market turmoil immediately following the announcement of the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995. Taku is interested in applying the concepts of International Relations and Social Theory to the international political-economic dynamics of the Asia-Pacific region. His main focus is on Japanese foreign policy in East Asia, spanning both Tokyo’s diplomatic- and economic relations with Asia and the US. His current research investigates the images of Asia in contemporary Japanese foreign- and economic policy pronouncements. Here, he explores how policy elites understand and explain Asia as both a threat and opportunity—an interpretation that transcends both the past and present. He is also looking into Japan’s soft power projection in Western Europe, researching on the way Japanese government perceives its political- and economic activities in the EU and the UK. He has published in leading journals in international relations and the international politics of the Asia-Pacific, including The Pacific Review, International Relations, and the International Relations of the Asia-Pacific.
Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies, University of Sheffield Meredith Warren is Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield, and is a member of SIIBS, the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. She directs the SIIBS research theme, Embodied Religion. Warren completed her degrees (BA, MA, PhD) at McGill University and from 2013–2015 held a postdoctoral position at the University of Ottawa funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec — Société et Culture. She has taught classes on women in early Judaism and Christianity, Koine Greek, ancient Mediterranean religions, and the early church. Meredith’s primary research interests lie in the cultural and theological interactions among the religions of ancient Mediterranean, especially early Judaism and Christianity. In particular, Meredith is interested in how shared cultural understandings of food and eating play a role in ancient narratives, including the Pseudepigrapha, Hellenistic romance novels, and the Gospels. Meredith’s doctoral work, recently published as My Flesh is Meat Indeed: A Nonsacramental Reading of John 6:51–58 (Fortress 2015), investigates how the Gospel of John makes use of Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman attitudes about sacrifice, divinity, and the consumption of human flesh in order to make claims about Jesus’ divinity. Her current book project, titled Hierophagy: Transformational Eating in Ancient Literature, examines how characters in literature are transformed by eating otherworldly food. An article emerging from this research, “My Heart Poured Forth Understanding: 4 Ezra’s Fiery Cup as Hierophagic Consumption,” was recently published at the journal Studies in Religion.
