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.

Thomas Banchoff is director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and serves as vice president for global engagement at Georgetown University, where he is a professor in the Department of Government and the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

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).

David Buckley is associate professor of political science and Paul Weber Endowed Chair in Politics, Science & Religion at the University of Louisville. His research focuses on the comparative relationship between religion and democracy. He is the author of Blessing America First: Religion, Populism, and Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration (2024) and Faithful to Secularism: The Religious Politics of Democracy in Ireland, Senegal and the Philippines (2017). 

Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics (LSE). His newest books are Degenerations of Democracy (2022, with Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor) and The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (2022, edited with Benjamin Fong).

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; 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.

Hent de Vries is Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities at New York University and director of the summer School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Before joining NYU, de Vries directed the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, holding the Russ Family Chair in the Humanities with a joint appointment in philosophy. De Vries is author, most recently, of Miracles et métaphysique (2019), the text of his Étienne Gilson lectures at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and of Le miracle au coeur de l'ordinaire (2018).