Xenia Dennen

Director of the The Keston Institute, Xenia Dennen is a Russian expert who for the past fourteen years has travelled widely in the Russian Federation studying the religious situation. In 1969 she helped found the Keston Institute with four distinguished figures, Professor Leonard Schapiro, Professor Peter Reddaway, Sir John Lawrence and the Revd Dr Canon Michael Bourdeaux, Keston’s first Director and now its President. After some years studying Russian politics at the LSE, Xenia Dennen in 1973 founded Keston’s academic journal, Religion in Communist Lands (renamed Religion, State and Society after the fall of communism) which she edited until 1981. During the1990s - years of economic and political turmoil in Russia - she worked as Keston’s Moscow representative and built up a network of contacts for the institute. In 1998 she was made a Fellow of the George Bell Institute (an international fellowship of scholars and artists). She was appointed Chairman of Keston Institute in 2002. Over the years she has published reviews and articles in the Tablet, the Month, Theology, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, The World Today (Royal Institute of International Affairs), Frontier (Keston Institute), the British East-West Journal, Glaube in der 2. Welt, Tiltas (British-Lithuanian Society), Humanitas (George Bell Institute) and Keston’s monthly internet journal Russian Review. She is on the livery of the Mercers’ Company.