Berkley Center

R. Scott Appleby is the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs and a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He co-directs, with Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, the Contending Modernities project, which explores the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world. Appleby is a graduate of Notre Dame and has both his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago.

Charles DeSantis serves as Associate Vice President for Benefits, Payroll and Wellness and Chief Benefits Officer for Georgetown University. His connection to Kenya is through his distinguished history of service to charitable organizations. He developed an arts education program for high school-age AIDS orphans in Nairobi’s Kibera slum; serves on the board of Nyumbani, a Kenyan orphanage for children with HIV/AIDS; and also served as an advisory board member for the Children of Kibera Foundation. His passion for art and the beautiful children of Kibera was the inspiration to start the Kibera Art Institute that has just entered its second year promoting visual arts creation in the community.  Charles is also the Chairman of the Board of the United States Association for UNHCR that serves refugees world-wide.  In 2010 he published the book, Smart, Beautiful and Important: Teaching art to AIDS-affected orphans in Africa's largest slum.

Qamar-ul Huda is the director of the Security and Violent Extremism Program and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy. He is an expert in Islamic theology, intellectual history, ethics, conflict resolution, and non-violence in contemporary Islam.

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.

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Keavy Nathan received his M.A. from Georgetown's Conflict Resolution Program. He worked at the Berkley Center as a research assistant during the 2010-2011 academic year.

Alfred Stepan was Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University; founding director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion; and co-director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life until his death in October 2017.

Gerrie ter Haar is emeritus professor of religion and development at the Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Much of her work has concerned the study of religion in Africa, and she has published widely on this subject, as well as on comparative issues.