Dr Liz Gulliford is Associate Professor in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues. She currently teaches on the University of Birmingham’s MA in Character Education. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Oxford Character Project. Liz has an interdisciplinary background with an MA in Theology (Trinity College Oxford), MPhil in Theology and Religious Studies (Queens’ College, Cambridge), and a BPS-accredited BSc in Psychology from Anglia Ruskin University. Her PhD (Queens’ College, Cambridge, 2011) established a firm, critical foundation for theoretical and practical work in positive psychology, positive education, and character education, upon which she has progressively built an international reputation.
During her tenure as an Associate Professor in Positive Psychology at the University of Northampton (2018 – 2023), Liz was Co-Pi on a John Templeton Foundation funded research project on ‘The role of exemplar narratives in cultivating character’ (2019 – 2023), which was part of a larger network grant on moral exemplars.
Liz has carried out extensive conceptual and empirical work on gratitude, forgiveness, hope, optimism, courage, compassion, virtue ethics, moral development, positive psychology, positive education, character education and exemplarism. She has published in a wide range of journals in psychology, education, and philosophy. She has also given numerous invited presentations internationally to both academic and lay audiences.