2024-26 Awardees

Announcing OMSC@PTS’s Lamin Sanneh Research Grant (2024-26) Awardees

OMSC@PTS is delighted to award Emmanuel Ojeifo and Dr. Hanna Kulahina-Stadnichenko our 2024-2026 Lamin Sanneh Research Grants ($10,000 each). Their projects contain great promise for expanding the horizons of mission studies, world Christianity, and intercultural theology, utilizing multi-disciplinary approaches that integrate theology, history, and social sciences to advance our understanding of the world Christian movement. Please join us in celebrating their work and scholarship!

Emmanuel Ojeifo is a fourth year PhD candidate in theology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. His area of research is in African Christian political theology, with specific interests in land, agrarian, and ecological questions. His doctoral dissertation explores the politics of land ownership and belonging in sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of Christian theological social ethics. Emmanuel earned his MA in Religion in Global Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and his MSc in Science and Religion at New College, the University of Edinburgh School of Divinity, as a Kirby Laing International Foundation Scholar 2018-19. He also holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Theology from Nigeria. Emmanuel is currently a Fellow of the Freedom and Prosperity Center of the US Atlantic Council, where he is researching the role of religious faith in the advancement of democratic freedom and prosperity in Africa. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of The Kukah Center, a research and policy think-tank in Nigeria, as well as Researcher at Bethany Land Institute, a residential ecological training institute in Uganda.

Research Project Title: African Christians and Ecological Renewal in African Rural Communities: Reinventing the Margins in Africa as the Locus of World Christianity

Dr. Hanna Kulahina-Stadnichenko is a senior researcher at the Department of Religious Studies of the H.S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv), PhD, and a Senior Researcher Fellow at Sankt Ignatios College, Stockholm, Sweden. She is a well-known researcher of religion, interfaith relations in Ukraine, an expert in the field of multicultural dialogue, national and religious identities in the context of social dialogue, humanistic values of civil society, and the relationship between spirituality and religion.

Dr. Hanna Kulahina-Stadnichenko has been repeatedly elected Scientific Secretary of the Ukrainian Association of Researchers of Religion (UARR) – from 2009 to the present, she is a member of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) and the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR). As the Scientific Secretary of the UARR, she has extensive experience in the field of church-state relations. She has more than 90 personal scientific publications in professional journals, collective monographs in Ukraine and abroad, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, including: “Christianity of the Postmodern Age” (Kyiv, 2005); “Religious Ukraine” (Kyiv, 2008); “Questions of Religion and Religious Studies: Religious Studies of Ukraine in the late XX – early XXI century” (Moscow, 2010); “Religious Security / Danger of Ukraine” Kyiv, 2019, others: orcid.org/0000-0001-6371-9213

Dr. Hanna Kulahina-Stadnichenko defended her PhD thesis on “Syncretism of pre-Christian beliefs and Orthodoxy in Ukraine” (2001). She completed her doctoral studies at the H.S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (“Contextuality of Orthodox Religiosity: Theological Visions and Religious Analysis”). In 2011, the author’s monograph “Religion in its social and personal functionality” was published. In 2020, the scientific monograph “The Phenomenon of Individual Religiosity of the Orthodox Believer” was published. Dr. Hanna Kulahina-Stadnichenko has participated in more than 80 scientific conferences in Ukraine and abroad, was a lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at leading universities in Ukraine.

You can visit the author’s YouTube channel and scientific blog of Dr. Hanna Kulahinа-Stadnichenko.

Research Project Title: Ecumenical Initiatives of Ukrainian Churches in the Challenges of Current Social Crises and War