Marsh Appointed Interim Director of J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, Daniel Named Interim Editor of 'Journal of Church and State'

Baylor University President John M. Lilley has appointed Dr. Christopher Marsh, associate professor of political science and church-state studies, as interim director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies and interim chair of church-state studies, effective immediately. Marsh succeeds Dr. Derek Davis, who has resigned from the posts and as editor of Journal of Church and State.
In a related announcement, Dr. Wallace Daniel, the Ralph L. and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, has been appointed interim editor of Journal of Church and State, beginning April 7.
Marsh joined the Dawson Institute in 2004 and also is director of Asian Studies at Baylor. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Connecticut, specializing in comparative politics and international relations.
He is the author of Unparalleled Reforms: China's Rise, Russia's Fall, and the Interdependence of Transition, Russia at the Polls and Making Russian Democracy Work. He is also editor of Burden or Blessing? Russian Orthodoxy and the Construction of Civil Society and Democracy, as well as co-editor (with June Teufel Dreyer), of US-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century and (with Nikolas Gvosdev), of Civil Society and the Search for Justice in Russia.
In addition, Marsh has authored more than 30 journal articles and book chapters, including those published in The National Interest, Religion, State & Society, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Journal of Church and State, Eurasian Geography & Economics, and Communist and Post-Communist Studies.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Daniel is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics with honors in 1964 and a doctorate in history in 1973. He joined the Baylor faculty in 1971 as an assistant professor of history, and was later named associate professor, professor, director of Soviet and East European Studies and director of the Honors Program. Before being appointed as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1996, Daniel served four years as chair of the department of history.
As an academic, Daniel has been named a Fulbright scholar three times: in 1969-70 as part of the official U.S.-Soviet Union Educational and Cultural Exchange Program in Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg); in 1979 for additional study in Moscow and Helsinki, Finland; and in 1996-97 for research in Moscow and Oxford University on "Religion and Democracy in Post-Communist Russia," one of only two funded studies at the time concerning all of Eastern Europe and Russia.
He is the author of the biography G.N. Teplov: A Statesman at the Court of Catherine the Great and the forthcoming book The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia. Some of his recent publications include "The Church and the Struggle for Renewal: The Experience of Three Moscow Parishes" in Burden or Blessing? Russian Orthodoxy and the Construction of Civil Society and Democracy and "Religion and the Struggle for Russia's Future" in the journal Religion, State and Society, as well as the forthcoming "The Children of Perestroika: Religion and Society in Post-communist Russia, 1991-2005" and "Reconstructing the 'Sacred Canopy': Mother Serafima and Novodevichy Monastery."
Davis received bachelor's, master's and law degrees from Baylor and earned his doctorate from the University of Texas at Dallas. He joined the Dawson Institute in 1990 and has been director since 1995. He served as associate editor, managing editor and editor of Journal of Church and State between 1990 and 2006.