Gwilym Beckerlegge studied religions at the Universities of Oxford and Lancaster where he became interested in the religions of South Asia and Japan from the nineteenth century to the present. His doctoral thesis examined continuity within the Ramakrishna Math and Mission with reference to the practice of seva, service to humanity, which was promoted by Swami Vivekananda. Much of this appeared in The Ramakrishna Mission: The Making of a Modern Hindu Movement (2000) and Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy of Service: A Study of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission (2006).  He has written extensively about Vivekananda in subsequent book chapters and articles.
​​​​​​​(For more details, see Gwilym’s web page http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/religious-studies/beckerlegge.shtmland entry under Open Research Online http://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/gtb2.html)
​​​​​​​Gwilym has been a member of the Discipline of Religious Studies at The Open University since 1993 and was head of discipline from 2002 to 2004. In 2006/07 he held the post of Professor of the Study of Religions at University College Cork, and in 2010 was a visiting professor at the Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale, Paris.