Berkley Center

Rajeev Bhargava is director of the Parekh Institute of Indian Thought at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, where he has worked since 2005. His writings include What is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (2010) and The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010).

Nathan J. Brown is a professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Arguing Islam After the Revival of Arab Politics (2016) and When Victory Is Not an Option: Islamist Movements in Arab Politics (2012). His work focuses on religion, law, and politics in the Arab world.

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.

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; at Georgetown University she is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and 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.

Kristina Stoeckl is assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck and principal investigator of the project “Postsecular Conflicts.” Her publications include, among others, "The Legacy of Pitirim Sorokin in the Transnational Alliances of Moral Conservatives" in the Journal of Classical Sociology (2017, with Dmitry Uzlaner) and The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (2014).

Peter van der Veer is director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen. He worked on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe throughout his career. Among his major publications are Gods on Earth (1988), Religious Nationalism (1994), Imperial Encounters (2001), The Value of Comparison (2006), and The Modern Spirit of Asia (2014).