Berkley Center

Damon Berry is an assistant professor of religious studies at St. Lawrence University, where his research centers on how racial and religious discourses impact logics of exclusion and violence. He has also explored anti-Muslim ideology and the intersection of new religious movements and ethics. He is the author of Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism (2017).

Shaun Casey is a senior fellow with the Luce Project on Religion and Its Publics at the University of Virginia and a Pulaski Institution non-resident fellow. He served as director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and professor of the practice in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 2017 to 2021. He previously was U.S. special representative for religion and global affairs and director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs. He has also served as professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and held positions at the Center for American Progress and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Casey has written on the ethics of the war in Iraq, as well the role of religion in American presidential politics. He is the author of The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 (2009) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology (forthcoming, with Michael Kessler); he is writing a book on ethics and international politics tentatively titled Niebuhr’s Children. Casey holds a B.A. from Abilene Christian University, MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and M.Div. and Th.D. in religion and society from Harvard Divinity School.

Jerome Copulsky, a scholar in residence at American University and a Berkley Center research fellow, specializes in modern Western religious thought, political theory, and church/state issues. He is currently working on a project on American civil religion and its discontents. From 2016 to 2017, he was the American Academy of Religion/Luce Fellow and senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State's Office of Religion and Global Affairs. He previously directed the Judaic Studies programs at Goucher College and Virginia Tech, and also taught at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and Indiana University. His scholarly work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Religion, Political Theology, and Perspectives on Political Science, with essays in Political Theology for a Plural Age (2013) and Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology (2013). His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, Washingtonian, Jerusalem Post, Jewish Review of Books, and Religion Dispatches. Copulsky earned a B.A from Wesleyan University, an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Larycia Hawkins teaches and researches at the University of Virginia, where she is jointly appointed as assistant professor in the Departments of Politics and of Religious Studies; she also serves as a faculty fellow at the university's Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture. Her research has centered around black theology and its relationship with political rhetoric and black political agendas. 

George Hawley is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama. His research interests include religion, electoral behavior, political parties, and the conservative movement in America. Hawley's book Making Sense of the Alt Right (2017) introduces the origins, beliefs, and evolution of the alt-right movement.

Paul Dafydd Jones is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (2008), which won a Templeton Award for Theological Promise in 2010, and over two dozen scholarly essays. In addition to co-editing two forthcoming collections (The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth and Liberation Theology), he is completing a book on patience and Christian thought. He is co-principal investigator, with Charles Mathewes, of “Religion and its Publics,” a research project at the University of Virginia funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Dorothy Kim is an assistant professor of English at Brandeis University who specializes in medieval literature. Her work has explored Jewish and Christian interaction in the Middle Ages, digital humanism, and feminist discourses. Kim has been recognized as a Fulbright Fellow, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and a Frankel Fellow at the University of Michigan. 

Charles T. Mathewes is the Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His interests include Christian theology, modern philosophical ethics and philosophy of religion, comparative religion and comparative religious ethics, and issues around religion, society, culture, and politics. Mathewes earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.