The Centre for the Study of World Christianity offers supervised research degrees at the Masters and PhD levels. For more information, see the programmes we offer.

The Centre attracts a diverse body of students from many different countries and religious traditions. Our students come from Cameroon, China, Ghana, India, Iran, South Korea, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, the Philippines, the USA, and, of course, the UK.

Below is a list of our current PhD students. You can also peruse some of the past PhD theses produced by Centre students, across the decades.

Kpanie Addy (Ghana) · My research examines the Catholic Church’s role in Ghanaian politics by focusing on the church’s attempts to contribute to Ghana’s transition from near-state collapse to socio-political and economic resurgence during the Rawlings era (1981-2001). My project, which uses archival documents and oral history, aims to uncover and explain the distinctive course pursued by the Catholic Church in Ghana, institutionally and through its affiliates, in response to Rawlings’s revolution and its agenda of realizing participatory democracy.

Ray Burbank (US) · My research focuses on conversion theology among evangelical missionaries and Marathi Christians connected to the Scottish mission in nineteenth-century Western India. I examine Christians and churches in Bombay, Poona, and Jalna alongside their ideological predecessors in British evangelicalism and Hindu bhakti and reformist groups. My thesis argues that these Christians demonstrate a corporate, or “horizontal,” understanding of conversion through their attention to the issues of church, caste, and country.

Elilo Ezung (India) · My research focusses on pneumatology in the Naga context of Northeast India. I am interested in exploring the kind of pneumatology that currently exists and the varying historical and socio-political factors that have given shape to it. By examining theological texts of selected tribal theologians in conversation with other theologians from various contexts, I aim to explicate key pneumatological themes namely community, creation, and charismata which will be helpful for the construction of a pneumatological framework that encompasses ‘spiritual’ and ‘concrete’ dimensions.

Zihao He (China) · Zihao’s project aims to analyse the role of theology in constructing and conducting the anti-Manchu violence in the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), the largest civil war in human history. Besides the textual analysis of the Taiping’s theology, the project will also provide a micro-level history, trying to understand why the theological construction was translated into actual violence.

Jackie Hwang (US/Taiwan) · My research explores the themes of migration, multiple belonging, and transnationalism in Chinese Christianity beyond the geopolitical boundaries of China. It focuses on the interactions between Chinese students studying in Singapore’s universities and Singaporean Chinese Christians. It seeks to demonstrate that transnational connections take shape around a familial conception, literal and figurative, thereby providing a pathway for negotiating one’s sense of belonging in migration. My integration of ethnography and theology will also examine how this familial conception contributes to an understanding of missiology and ecclesiology in transnational Chinese contexts.

David Lewis (Canada) · My research is a comparative project examining World Christianity approaches to ecotheology from various cultural and denominational perspectives, where I examine the theological works of Eastern Orthodox theologian John Chryssavgis, Kenyan, Roman Catholic environmentalist Wangari Maathai, and Norwegian Lutheran theologian Tore Johnsen. My critique of three themes prevalent within contemporary Western cosmologies, namely dualism, disconnection from the earth, and disenchantment leads to a consideration of three alternatives, namely holism, human interconnectedness with creation, and sacramentality.

Christina Li (Hong Kong) · My project conducts a socio-historical study of Christianity in Hong Kong, exploring how Protestant churches formulated their mission strategies and were consciously or unconsciously shaped by the changing social and political contexts in Hong Kong from 1967-1997. It pays particular attention to four aspects that characterised the Hong Kong context in this period: rapid urbanisation, immigration, a highly developed business and free enterprise culture, and the concluding phase of British rule. The research hopes to contribute to scholarship on the history of Christianity in Hong Kong, as well as supplementing the secular scholarship on Asian Tiger economies, by addressing the roles and contributions of the Protestant Christian community.

Jeff Peterson (USA) · My project is a three-decade history (1965-1995) of theological engagement among the Crow people of Montana (USA) and a visionary cohort of Catholic missionaries who arrived following Vatican II (1962-1965).  Because of the Crows’ location, collective identity, unique history and political relationships, the missionaries found an inviting place to attempt to carry out the ideals of Vatican II.  This study will contribute to discussions concerning inculturation, syncretism, and multiple-religious belonging, and will also demonstrate how this particular engagement was part of broader networks of influence and understanding.

Biao Zhu (China/Canada) · My research examines the ecclesiological complexity of the Protestant Church in mainland China by identifying the distinctive Chinese ecclesiologies of four Chinese Protestant ecclesiological movements (namely, Little Flock, traditional house church, Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and urban house church). It shows how ecclesiological differences address different contextual needs. Furthermore, it develops an ecclesiological framework to assess the historical contextual requirements and the contemporary challenges of these Chinese ecclesiologies, and hopes to prompt developments among each movement.

Alison Zilversmit (UK) · My project explores how the Anglican British mission organization United Society Partners in the Gospel incorporated constructions of socio-economic “development” and “aid” into their missiologies in the mid-20th century. I utilize an intellectual historical approach informed by theological and sociological considerations to analyze the USPG archives particularly within the global context of decolonization. I ask how this transition was shaped by and shaped global power-dynamics between this global northern Anglican agency and its global southern Anglican interlocutors, and whether development may be a cross-culturally informed category in USPG mission.