John Hinnells


Professor John Russell Hinnells was Professor of Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. At various times he held the posts of lecturer at Newcastle University, then Professor of Comparative Religion at Manchester University, and later at University of Derby and Liverpool Hope University, and was a fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge.
After school, he spent some time at Mirfield as part of the Community of the Resurrection, where he was influenced by the work of Trevor Huddleston. He then went to King's College London, tutored by Christopher Evans and Morna Hooker, and with Desmond Tutu as a tutorial partner. Later he would undertake Postgraduate work at the School of Oriental and African Studies, with Sir Harold Bailey and Mary Boyce.
From 1967 he shaped his subject in several ways over a period of five decades:
A festschrift was published in his honour in 2017, building on his thematic study of relgions to explore religion and material wealth. His work was memorialised in The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and by a memorial lecture by Almut Hintze at SOAS, His book collection is now at the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge, and is being catalogued as the John Hinnells Collection and made available through the Cambridge University Library.