Dr Matthew Dal Santo

A writer, historian and foreign affairs commentator, with Honours degrees from both Sydney and Cambridge Universities.

 

Biography

A long-time student of the intersection of history, politics and religion in Western Eurasia, Dr Matthew Dal Santo is Associate Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at St Patrick's Seminary University in Menlo Park ("Silicon Valley"), California.

Educated at the Universities of Sydney and Cambridge (PhD, 2009), he is a former fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (UK), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and the Kennan Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies, Washington, DC (USA).

His forthcoming book (Teokratia: A political theology) with Princeton University Press explores contemporary Orthodoxy from the perspective of the wider dynamics of secularisation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Having led Academy Travel's tours to Russia, Siberia, and the Russian Far East for many years, he is an experienced and popular tour leader. Doing his best to acquire a working knowledge of Armenian, he first visited the Caucasus from the Russian side of the border.

He is particularly interested in how the revival of Orthodoxy has encouraged the return of the age-old idea of ‘Holy Rus’ as well as rehabilitation of the culture and achievements of Imperial Russia, as for example in the canonisation in 2000 of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family as saints. Matthew has travelled extensively in the Russian-speaking world, from Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus to Siberia and the Russian Far East. Before returning to academic work, Matthew was briefly a policy officer with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Matthew has a PhD in Ecclesiastical History from the University of Cambridge, where from 2005 to 2008 he held the Lightfoot Scholarship. In 2007 he was elected Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge’s leading college, and was appointed Associate Lecturer in the award-winning Faculty of History. Matthew also has an MPhil from Cambridge and a BA (Hons I) from the University of Sydney, where he won the University Medal in 2004.

Matthew is often asked to write on Russian and European politics by the Lowy Institute for Foreign Policy in Sydney and you can check out some of his writings for The Interpreter here: www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter.

In addition to English, Matthew speaks Danish, French, Italian and Russian.

 Get to know Matthew

Hear from Dr Matthew Dal Santo on our podcast, The Thinking Traveller, as he explores the changing attitudes in contemporary Russia since the collapse of Communism, and the rehabilitation of the Romanovs.