Berkley Center

José Casanova is one of the world's leading scholars in the sociology of religion and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center, where his work focuses on globalization, religions, and secularization. He is also professor emeritus at Georgetown University, where he previously taught in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. During 2017 he was the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the U.S. Library of Congress' John W. Kluge Center, where he worked on a book manuscript on Early Modern Globalization through a Jesuit Prism. He has published works on a broad range of subjects, including religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994), has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. In 2012, Casanova was awarded the Theology Prize from the Salzburger Hochschulwochen in recognition of his life-long achievement in the field of theology. Casanova is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Father Francis Clooney, S.J., is an American Jesuit and the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at the Harvard Divinity School. He is also the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard and a fellow of the British Academy. His academic work focuses on theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India, as well as the developing field of comparative theology, and he is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles. Previously he taught for over twenty years at Boston College. Fr. Clooney is a graduate of Fordham University and the Weston School of Theology, and he obtained his doctorate from the University of Chicago.

Barbara Ganson is an associate professor of History at Florida Atlantic University. Ganson is currently interested in working with colonial Guarani texts to understand processes of cultural adaptation and indigenous voices during the late eighteenth century. She is an award-winning author of a scholarly book The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata (2003). She is the recipient of a Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title and a 2005 Murdo MacLeod Book Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association for the best book in the field published during the previous two years. Ganson received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her doctoral dissertation entitled "Better Not Take My Manioc: Guarani Religion, Society, and Politics in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay," under the direction of Dr. Susan Deans Smith.

John O’Malley, S.J., is a Jesuit priest and university professor in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University. His specialty is the religious culture of early modern Europe, particularly Italy, and he is also an expert on the Second Vatican Council. O’Malley has held a number of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other academic organizations. Among his many publications are What Happened at Vatican II (Harvard University Press, 2008), now in six languages, and Trent: What Happened at the Council (HUP, 2012), in five languages and winner of the John Gilmary Shea Prize for best book, 2013. Among his edited volumes are The Jesuits and the Arts (2005, co-edited with Gauvin Alexander Bailey) and Art, Culture, and the Jesuits: The Imago Primi Saeculi, 1640 (2015).

Father Antoni Ucerler, S.J., is a British and Canadian Jesuit priest serving as a visiting associate professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University since 2012. He also is a senior tutor at Campion Hall at the University of Oxford as well as a member of the Research Centre for Japanese Language and Linguistics. His academic studies have focused on the European expansion into East Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on Japan and Christianity. He speaks or reads in twelve languages, lived for over a decade in Japan, and is the author of multiple published works. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and his Bachelor of Sacred Theology from the Gregorian University. Fr. Ucerler entered the Society of Jesus in 1981 and was ordained a priest in 1994.