Biographical notes

Lil Abdo teaches religious studies at a secondary school in London. She is completing her doctorate in early British Bahá'í history at the School for African and Oriental Studies, University of London.

Necati Alkan holds an MA degree in Near and Middle East Studies from the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany, where he is currently a PhD candidate in late Ottoman history.

Dominic Brookshaw is a doctoral candidate in Arabic and Persian literature at Oxford University, where he also teaches Persian.

Christopher Buck is currently assistant professor of American thought and language at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He is the author of Paradise and Paradigm: Key Symbols in Persian Christianity and the Bahá'í Faith (State University of New York Press, 1999) and Symbol and Secret: Quran Commentary in Baha'u'llah's Kitab-i-Iqan (Kalimat Press, 1995), and is currently writing Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy (Kalimat Press, forthcoming).

William Collins is the Policy and Planning Program Manager at the United States Copyright Office in Washington, DC. He trained as a librarian, and has worked at academic libraries in the USA, and at the Bahá'í World Centre Library in Israel, and has authored a Bahá'í bibliography, articles on librarianship, Bahá'í history, and millennialism.

Seena Fazel is co-editor of the Bahá'í Studies Review.

John S. Hatcher is professor of English Literature at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, where he specializes in medieval literature and linguistics, creative writing, and Bahá'í studies. He is presently associate editor for the Journal of Bahá'í Studies, and has published twelve books and over one hundred poems and articles in refereed periodicals and journals.

John Hick has held senior academic positions in theology and the philosophy of religion in the US and UK, and is currently emeritus professor of theology at Birmingham University.

Franklin Lewis is associate professor of Persian at Emory University. He is the author of Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oneworld, 2000), winner of the 2001 British-Kuwaiti Friendship Prize in Middle Eastern Studies, and In a Voice of Their Own: Stories by Iranian Women written since the Revolution of 1979 (Mazda, 1996).

Brian A. Miller received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley for his dissertation, "The Lovers Way: A Critical Comparison of the Nazm al-Suluk by Ibn al-Farid with the Qasidiyyi-Varqaiyyih by Baha'u'llah." He is currently a research fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and also a working chef.

Moojan Momen has recently published The Phenomenon of Religion (Oneworld, 1999) and Islam and the Bahá'í Faith (George Ronald, 2000).

Udo Schaefer, former chief prosecutor at the state court of Heidelberg, retired in 1988. He is the author of a number of books and articles, most recently co-authoring Making the Crooked Straight (George Ronald, 2000).

Will C. van den Hoonaard is professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada and is author of six books, including The Origins of the Baha'i Community of Canada, 1898-1948 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996).

Iarfhlaith Watson (PhD, National University of Ireland) is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University College Dublin.

Robert Weinberg is a radio producer, website editor, and the author of books on Ethel Rosenberg and Bernard Leach. He is currently working on a biography of Lady Blomfield.