Berkley Center

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.

Peter Berger was one of the foremost scholars in the field of sociology of religion. A senior research fellow and professor emeritus of religion, sociology, and theology at Boston University at the time of his death in June 2017, he previously served as the founding director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University. He also taught at the University of North Carolina, Hartford Theological Seminary, Rutgers, and the New School for Social Research. His work focused on sociological theory, sociology of religion, and issues at the intersection of theology and social science. His works include Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Reaffirmation of Christianity (2004), Religious America, Secular Europe (2008, with Grace Davie and Effie Fokas), and In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions without Becoming a Fanatic (2009, with Anton Zijderveld). Berger earned his B.A. from Wagner College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research.

Daniel Brumberg is an associate professor of government and director of democracy and governance studies at Georgetown University. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy. His work focuses on political, social and economic change in the Middle East and wider Muslim 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.

Sam Cherribi is a senior lecturer in Emory University's Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and a former member of parliament in the Netherlands. He conducts research on European politics, Islam in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, EU governance, and development in low-income countries. While in parliament from 1994 to 2002 he represented the Netherlands in the Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Assembly of the West European Union. Cherribi is the director of the Emory Development Initiative; he is also affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of In the House of War: Dutch Islam Observed (2010) and "Politicians' Perceptions of the Muslim Problem: The Dutch Example in European Context" in Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (2007). Cherribi holds a Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam.

Diana Eck is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard Divinity School and Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. She directs the research of The Pluralism Project, which documents the shifting religious landscape in the United States. Her most recent book is A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (2001). She is also author of the award-winning Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (1993) among others. Eck was appointed to a State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom in 1996 and was President of the American Academy of Religion in 2005-6. She received her BA from Smith College, MA from the University of London, and PhD from Harvard University.

John L. Esposito is a University Professor, professor of religion and international affairs, professor of Islamic studies, and the founding director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. He served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies; he is currently a member of the High Level Group of the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, a body of 20 international leaders that guides the alliance's work. He has written over 30 books, including Islamophobia: The Challenges of Pluralism in the 21st Century (2011, with Ibrahim Kalin), Who Speaks for Islam? (2007, with Dalia Mogahed), Islam: The Straight Path (2004), and Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (2002). Esposito received the American Academy of Religion’s 2005 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion.

Danièle Hervieu-Léger is a French sociologist who specializes in the sociology of religion, and her research focuses included the description of sociology and the theoretical interpretation of religion’s modern manifestations, including secularization, individualism of belief, forms of religiosity and of communalization and institutional transformations. Hervieu-Léger was the director of studies at France’s elite School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) from 1993 to 2004; from 2004 to 2009 she served as the president of the school. She had previously been a researcher with the National Center for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) from 1974 to 1993. Hervieu-Léger also served as the editor in chief of the international journal Archives of the Social Sciences and Religion (Archive de Sciences Sociales des Religions) from 1993 to 2004.