Berkley Center

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.

David Hempton, an internationally recognized historian of Christianity with particular expertise in evangelism, has served as dean of Harvard Divinity School since July 2012. Hempton joined Harvard in 2007, where he was named the Divinity School’s “Outstanding Teacher of the Year” in 2008 as well as the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies and the John Lord O’Brien Professor of Divinity. Prior to arriving at Harvard, Hempton taught at Boston University and served as director of the School of History in the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is a fellow at the Royal Historical Society and has held various fellowships from institutes like the National Endowment for the Humanities. Hempton is a native of Northern Ireland and received his Ph.D. at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Michael Kessler is executive director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, an associate professor of the practice of moral and political theory in the Department of Government, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law. Kessler’s research and writing focus on theology, philosophical and religious ethics, and social, political, and legal theory. He is interested in problems of law and religion, both globally and in the U.S. constitutional context. Kessler is the author of several edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology, co-edited with Shaun Casey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Political Theology for a Plural Age (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Mystics: Presence and Aporia, co-edited with Christian Sheppard (University of Chicago Press, 2003). He also wrote “Engaging Religion in U.S. Foreign Affairs,” a chapter in the Companion to Religion and Politics in the United States (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Kessler is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Erik Owens is associate director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and an associate professor of the practice in theology and international studies at Boston College. His research explores the intersections between religion and public life, particularly the challenge of fostering the common good of a religiously diverse society. Owens previously worked at the University of Chicago and DePaul University, as well as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the City of Chicago’s Board of Ethics. He is the co-editor of three books: Gambling: Mapping the American Moral Landscape (2009); Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning (2004); and The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics (2003). He is a member of the American Academy of Religion's Committee on the Public Understanding of Religion. Owens was a 2015-2016 Berkley Center research fellow. He earned a B.A. from Duke University, M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.