Berkley Center

Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps based in the Berkley Center. His work deals primarily with the ways religious ideas are given expression in literature, the arts, music, and culture in the broadest sense. In the American Pilgrimage Project he examines the ways religious beliefs inform the experiences of the American people at crucial moments in their lives. Elie is also the moderator of Georgetown's Faith and Culture Series, a series of public conversations about the interaction of religion, art, literature, and society. He is the author of two books. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) is a group portrait of four twentieth-century Catholic writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day). Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) chronicles the transformation of Bach's music through recording technology in the hands of great musicians (Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, Yo-Yo Ma, et al.). Both books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own received the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, and two Modern Language Association book prizes.

James Wood has been a staff writer and literary critic at The New Yorker since 2007. He is also a visiting Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He previously was the chief literary critic at the Guardian from 1992 to 1995 and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. Wood is the author of three essay collections: The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (2012), The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and The Novel (2004), and The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999). He has also written a novel, The Book Against God (2003), and a work of criticism, How Fiction Works (2008). He won a National Magazine Award in 2008 for his criticism in The New Yorker. Wood earned his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University.