Berkley Center

Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad is Professor of the History of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Haddad's fields of expertise include twentieth-century Islam; intellectual, social and political history in the Arab world; and Islam in North America and the West. Haddad's most recent research focuses on Muslims in the West and Islamic revolutionary movements. She previously taught a class supported through the Berkley Center's Doyle Seminars project. Haddad is author or editor of numerous books, including Becoming American? The Forging of Arab and Muslim Identity in Pluralist America (2011), Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today (2006/2011), Muslim Minorities in the West: Visible and Invisible (2002), and Islam, Gender and Social Change (1998, ed. with John Esposito). She holds a B.A. from Beirut College For Women, MRE from Boston University, M.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Ph.D. from Hartford Seminary.

Allen Hertzke is the David Ross Boyd Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma (OU) and faculty fellow in religious freedom for OU’s Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage. He is also a distinguished senior fellow with Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. Hertzke has written extensively on religious advocacy in politics, particularly faith-motivated activism in foreign policy. His publications include Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1 Historical Perspectives and Christianity and Freedom: Volume 2 Contemporary Perspectives (2016, ed. with Timothy Samuel Shah), Religious Freedom in America: Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges (2015, ed.), The Future of Religious Freedom: Global Challenges (2012, ed.), and Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (2004). He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. From 2011 to 2016, Hertzke was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project and co-chair of its Christianity and Freedom Project steering committee from 2012 to 2013.

David Little, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center, is a leading authority on the history of religious freedom, ethics and human rights, and religion and conflict resolution. Little retired in 2009 as T.J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict at Harvard Divinity School and as an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Until summer 1999, he was senior scholar in religion, ethics, and human rights at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). From 1996 to 1998, he was member of the Advisory Committee to the State Department on Religious Freedom Abroad. Little’s publications include several volumes in the USIP series on religion, nationalism, and intolerance, as well Religion and Nationalism in Iraq: A Comparative Perspective (2007, with Donald K. Swearer), and Peacemakers in Action: Profiles of Religion in Conflict Resolution (2007). Little was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.

Timothy Samuel Shah is a distinguished research scholar in the Politics Department at the University of Dallas, as well as as a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute and the principal investigator for the Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society (FORIS) project at the Religious Freedom Institute. Previously a research professor of government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, he also served as associate director of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project, director for international research of the center's Religious Freedom Research Project, and associate professor of the practice of religion and global politics in Georgetown University's Government Department. He is a political scientist specializing in religious freedom as well as in the broad relationship between religious and political dynamics in theory, history, and contemporary practice. He is author of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott) and editor of Under Caesar's Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution (2018, with Daniel Philpott) and Homo Religiosus? Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience (2018, with Jack Friedman). Shah received his A.B., magna cum laude, in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 2002, both from Harvard University.

Mariz Tadros is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She is a political scientist specializing in the politics and human development of the Middle East, with a focus on democratization, Islamist politics, gender, sectarianism, human security, and religion and development. Previously, she was an assistant professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, and she served as a journalist for the English-language newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly, publishing more than 300 articles on civil society, women in Egypt and the Arab world, poverty, and social justice. She is the author of Copts at the Crossroads: The Challenges of Building Inclusive Democracy in Egypt (2013) and The Muslim Brotherhood in Contemporary Egypt: Democracy Redefined or Confined? (2012). Tadros was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project. She holds a doctorate from Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford.

Kurt Werthmuller has been a senior analyst at CyberPoint International since 2013, with expertise in the political, social, and religious dynamics in the Middle East. He previously was an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom. Prior to that Werthmuller taught at the Catholic University of America, Azusa Pacific University, Geneva College, and Westmont College. Werthmuller was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project. He holds a B.A. from Messiah College, A.M. from Harvard University, and Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Robert Louis Wilken is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past president of the American Academy of Religion, the North American Patristics Society, and the Academy of Catholic Theology. He is chairman of the board of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the publisher of First Things. Among his numerous publications are The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (2013), The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (2003), The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (1984/2003), and Remembering the Christian Past (1995). He has taught at Fordham University, the University of Notre Dame, the Institutum Patristicum (Augustinianum) in Rome, the Gregorian University in Rome, and Providence College. 

Robert Woodberry directs the Project on Religion and Economic Change and is a senior research professor at Baylor University. Woodberry previously was an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore. A sociologist specializing in the impact of religion on political development and economic change, Woodberry's work has analyzed the long-term social, political, and economic impact of Protestant missionary activity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This research resulted in his seminal article “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy”; it was published in the American Political Science Review in May 2012 and won the American Political Science Association’s 2013 Luebbert Best Article Award, given for the best article in the field of comparative politics published in the previous two years. From 2011 to 2016, he was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project. Woodberry holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.