At the end of July 2026, it was announced that the inaugural Michael Huffington Chair in Eastern Orthodox Christianity was to be established at the University of Oxford (UK). The chair will begin its work in September. The responsibility for developing a new academic centre and overseeing a recently established Prize in Ecumenical Relations has been entrusted to Paul L. Gavrilyuk (b. 1972), a native of Kyiv and an internationally renowned Orthodox theologian. The chair was established in memory of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (1934–2022), a British hierarch who himself taught Orthodox theology at the University of Oxford for 35 years, until his retirement (1966–2001).
Paul Gavrilyuk graduated from the Kyiv School of Mathematics and later from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 1993, he moved to the United States intending to devote his life to the study of theology. In 1993–2001, Gavrilyuk did his graduate work at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX), obtaining his Master of Theological Studies in 1995 and Ph.D. in 2001. For a quarter of a century, he was professionally associated with the University of St. Thomas (Saint Paul, MN).
Paul Gavrilyuk’s publications have been translated into 13 languages. He has given numerous lectures in Kyiv and Ukraine. He also had long-standing links with the University of Oxford – three of his books were published by the university’s Press: The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (2004), Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (2013), and The Oxford Handbook of Deification (2024; co-editor with Andrew Hofer, OP, and Matthew Levering).
The initiative to provide financial support for the new chair came from Roy Michael Huffington, Jr. (b. 1947). After a period in the Presbyterian and Episcopal Churches, he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy under the influence of his wife, who was of Greek origin. He provided financial support to the Huffington Ecumenical Institute, founded in 2007 at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, CA), which is currently headed by another Ukrainian-born theologian, Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun.
