DEAN VICTOR KAZANJIAN
Biographical Information

As Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at Wellesley College, Victor Kazanjian nurtures the religious and spiritual life of the College, building community among people of diverse religious backgrounds and working with faculty, staff and students to incorporate spirituality into the educational experience.

The Dean created and now oversees a new multi-faith program of religious and spiritual life which seeks to respond to the rich diversity of religious traditions and spiritual beliefs represented among community members through a vision of a multi-faith community in which all particular expressions of faith are celebrated, no one religious tradition is seen as normative and dialogue about common religious and spiritual principles is nurtured.

The Dean coordinates a multi-faith religious life team which includes chaplains, advisors and student leaders for the Baha'i, Buddhist, Christian (Orthodox, Protestant and Roman Catholic) Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Native African, Native American, Pagan, Sikh, Unitarian Universalist and Zoroastrian religious communities.

Together with this team, the Dean designs and leads all multi-faith community worship rituals and provides opportunities for inter religious dialogue and discussion on moral, ethical and spiritual issues affecting the community and the world.

Working with the President and the College's administration, trustees, and student leaders, the Dean also leads a program that affirms the essential role of spirituality in the learning process and seeks to integrate spirituality into the educational program at Wellesley.

Victor also serves as Co-director of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at Wellesley and is a lecturer in this academic program. The Peace & Justice Studies Program provides students with an opportunity to integrate in a program of study the many areas of intellectual inquiry relating to the historical and contemporary search for a peaceful and just society and world. He co-teaches the introductory level course in this program entitled Introduction to the Study of Conflict, Justice and Peace.

He also serves as director of Wellesley’s Wintersession in India program, a program which regularly takes Wellesley students to the North of India for a three and ½ week course that focuses on understanding the historical development of the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence and how Gandhian strategies have been adapted by grassroots community-based organizations to address the challenges facing India and the world today. In 2007, Dean Kazanjian served as the Fulbright Professor for Peace Studies at Banaras Hindu University teaching a course on Religious Diversity and Democracy in India and the United States.

Dean Kazanjian is also the co-founder and Senior Advisor for the Education as Transformation Project, which is a national project involving more than 350 colleges and universities exploring issues of religious pluralism and spirituality in higher education.

He is the co-editor of Education as Transformation: Religious Pluralism, Spirituality and a New Vision for Higher Education in America, (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) and Beyond Tolerance: a Campus Religious Diversity Kit, (Washington: NASPA, 2004) and many articles including most recently “Towards Multi-cultural Learning Communities” in Building the Interfaith Youth Movement, (New York: Alta Mira Press, 2006) and “Religion, Spirituality and Intellectual Development,” in the  Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning, Oxford College atEmory University, Summer, 2005. Victor writes and speaks regularly on issues of inter religious dialogue, developing multi-faith and multi-cultural communities, spirituality and education, leadership and learning, principles of peacemaking, diversity and democracy, and social justice and institutional change.

A graduate of Harvard University and the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dean Kazanjian is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. Prior to joining Wellesley College in February 1993, he served as Director of Program Development at Episcopal City Mission in Boston, an organization which works to address the systemic causes of poverty and injustice through the support of religious and community-based groups in Eastern Massachusetts. Earlier, he served congregations and community organizations in the South Bronx, New York, San Francisco, California and Milton, Massachusetts, where he developed multi-faith models of interpersonal and institutional change. Dean Kazanjian has also worked with congregations and organizations around issues of diversity and difference as a part of building effective working teams and healthy communities.

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