John Hinnells Editor & Author

John Hinnells was Professor of the Comparative Study of Religions at Manchester and SOAS. He is now retired but has a part time Research Professorship at Liverpool Hope University and is Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at SOAS. He has published widely in the area of South Asian religion, in particular the Parsis, and the comparative study of religions. His books include Zoroastrians in Britain (1996), Zoroastrian and Parsi Studies: selected works of John R. Hinnells (2000), and The Zoroastrian Diaspora (2005).

Alan Williams is currently Senior Lecturer in Comparative Religion in the School of Arts Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester. He has published several books on Iranian studies and also writes about the history of religions, comparative literature and translation studies. His most recent book is a new English blank verse translation of the first book of Rumi's Persian mystical masterpiece, the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi (Spiritual Verses for Penguin Classics, 2006).