Irina Paert
University of Tartu
Irina Paert was born in the Altai Mountains. She has studied history in the Urals State University (Yekaterinburg) in 1987-92 and during the fateful 1990-91 was an exchange student in what was to become the Moscow State Humanities University. In 1993/94 she had joined the new graduate school at the Central European University in Budapest, benefitting from George Soros’ generous scholarship. She then had leaped to the University of Essex, where – after an MA in Social History, she had completed, in two years, her PhD jointly supervised by the History and Sociology departments. She had held postdoctoral fellowships and a lectureship in the Universities of Manchester and Bangor. In 2005 she had moved to Tallinn where she resides today with her husband and two children. Currently she works as an associate professor at the School of Theology and Religious Studies at Tartu University. Paert specializes in Russian religious studies, focusing particularly on the history and culture of Old Believes and the Russian Orthodox Church. She had published two monographs: Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia 1760-1850 (Manchester, 2003), and Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy (DeKalb, 2010). Currently, she is leading a research project “Orthodoxy as Solidarity: An examination of popular and conciliar Orthodoxy in the Baltic provinces and independent Estonia” funded by the Estonian Research Council. She is a co-founder of St John’s School in Tallinn (Estonia), a private faith-based K-12 school and an organiser of international conferences based in this school and the Centre of Arvo Pärt.