the rt revd dr. Rowan Williams

Dr. Rowan Williams was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, and former Bishop of Wales and Bishop of Monmouth. He spent much of his academic career at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and was awarded the Oxford higher degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1989, an honorary DCL degree in 2005, and an honorary DD from Cambridge University in 2006. He holds honorary doctorates from more than a dozen other universities, from Durham to K U Leuven, Toronto to Bonn. Dr. Williams was the 35th Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, from 2013 to 2020 and is an Honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought at the University of Cambridge. He was McDonald Professor of Christian Theology at St Mellitus College from 2016-2020.

Dr. Williams is also a noted poet and translator of poetry, and, apart from Welsh, speaks or reads nine other languages. He learnt Russian in order to read the works of Dostoevsky in the original which led to the book, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction. He has also published studies of Arius, Teresa of Avila, and Sergii Bulgakov, together with writings on a wide range of theological, historical and political themes. He is acknowledged internationally as an outstanding theological scholar, teacher and writer on moral, ethical and social topics and, more recently, increasingly on contemporary cultural and interfaith issues.