Berkley Center

Jocelyne Cesari holds the Chair of Religion and Politics and is director of research at the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; she is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, where she previously was an associate professor of the practice of religion, peace, and conflict resolution in the Department of Government. She is the T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School. Former president of the European Academy of Religion, her work on religion, political violence, and conflict resolution has garnered recognition and awards from numerous international organizations such as the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs and the Royal Society for Arts in the United Kingdom. She is a Professorial Fellow at Australian Catholic University's Institute for Religion, Politics and Society. She teaches on contemporary Islam and politics at Harvard Divinity School and directs the Islam in the West program. Cesari is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Ayesha Chaudhry is associate professor of Islamic studies and gender studies at the University of British Columbia and a 2015-2016 Rita E. Hauser Research Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her research focuses on Islamic law, Qur’anic exegesis, and feminist hermeneutics. She is the author of Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender (2013) and is currently collaborating on a book project on interfaith feminist hermeneutics; she has also published in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Feminist Theology, and the Journal for Comparative Islamic Studies. She is an Early Career Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and recipient of the Research Mentorship award for her “Living Islam Between Text and Practice: A Case Study of Domestic Violence” project. Chaudhry received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto and Ph.D. from New York University’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

Anver Emon is a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and the Canada Research Chair in Religion, Pluralism and the Rule of Law. His research focuses on premodern and modern Islamic legal history and theory, premodern modes of governance and adjudication, and the role of sharia both inside and outside the Muslim world. Along with numerous articles, Emon is the author of Islamic Natural Law Theories (2010) and Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire of Law (2012), as well as co-editor of Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law: Searching for Common Ground? (2012). He is founding editor of Middle East Law and Governance: An Interdisciplinary Journal and a series editor of the Oxford Islamic Legal Studies Series. Emon holds five advanced degrees, including a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, M.A. from the University of Texas, Austin, and LL.M. and J.S.D. from Yale Law School.

Emma Tomalin is the director of the Centre for Religion and Public Life and a senior lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. She has been a member of the American Academy of Religion’s Committee for the Public Understanding of Religion since 2014. Her main research interests are focused around religions and global development and religion, gender, and society. Her articles have been published in Oxford Development Studies and Gender and Development, among others. Her most recent book is The Routledge Handbook of Religions and Global Development (2015); she is also the author of Religions and Development (2013) and Gender, Faith and Development (2011), among others, and co-editor of Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas (2014).

Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at the Atlantic. He has written about the drug trade in Eastern Europe, the rise of corporate anthropology, the private prison industry, the management of the 1.3-million employees of Indian Railways, sanctions in Iran, and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Burma, and Libya. He is currently a lecturer in political science at Yale University. Wood started in journalism as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily. He has written for the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, and has lectured at Boston University, Harvard University, the Royal Society for the Arts, and Yale University. He studied philosophy and languages at Harvard and the American University in Cairo.