Berkley Center

Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf is a professor of anthropology at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her research areas include the Sudan, Oman Sultanate and Zanzibar, the United States, and the United Kingdom; she focuses on migration, human rights, gender, diversity and inclusion, social justice and ethnology in Africa, and the Indian Ocean diasporas. She is teaching a class supported through the Berkley Center's Doyle Seminars project during fall 2017. Abusharaf's publications include Africa and the Gulf: Blurred Boundaries and Shifting Ties (2015, edited with Dale Eickelman), Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan: Politics and the Body in a Squatter Settlement (2009), Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives (2006, as editor), and Wanderings: Sudanese Migrants and Exiles in North America (2002). She also edited "What is Left of the Left," a special edition of the South Atlantic Quarterly. 

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer is a research professor in the School of Foreign Service, co-convener of the Indigenous Studies Working Group, and a Berkley Center faculty fellow. She has been at Georgetown since 1987 in the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) and the Anthropology Department, and has twice been a Doyle Faculty Fellow through the Berkley Center. She is editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia and is author or editor of six books on Russia, Central Asia, and the Circumpolar North. Her research interests focus on the intersections of religion, politics, ecology, human rights, and comparative indigenous activism. Her latest book, based on fieldwork in three republics, is Galvanizing Nostalgia: Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Siberia (Cornell University Press, 2021).

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.

Paul Freston is CIGI Chair in Religion and Politics in Global Context at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University. Freston is also professor of sociology on the post-graduate programme in sociology at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil. His research interests include religion and globalization and Pentecostalism in the Global South.

Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad is Professor of the History of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Haddad's fields of expertise include twentieth-century Islam; intellectual, social and political history in the Arab world; and Islam in North America and the West. Haddad's most recent research focuses on Muslims in the West and Islamic revolutionary movements. She previously taught a class supported through the Berkley Center's Doyle Seminars project. Haddad is author or editor of numerous books, including Becoming American? The Forging of Arab and Muslim Identity in Pluralist America (2011), Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today (2006/2011), Muslim Minorities in the West: Visible and Invisible (2002), and Islam, Gender and Social Change (1998, ed. with John Esposito). She holds a B.A. from Beirut College For Women, MRE from Boston University, M.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Ph.D. from Hartford Seminary.

Paul L. Heck is a professor of Islamic studies in Georgetown University’s Department of Theology and the founding director of the Study of Religions Across Civilizations. His scholarly interests focus on the history of skepticism in Islam, mysticism and the role of spirituality in Muslim society, views on martyrdom in the three monotheist traditions, the phenomenon of theo-humanism, the emergent field of comparative scripture, and issues in political theology. Heck previously taught a class supported through the Berkley Center's Doyle Seminars project. He is the author of Political Theology and Islam: From the Rise of Empire to the Modern State (2023); Skepticism in Classical Islam: Moments of Confusion (2013); and Common Ground: Islam, Christianity and Religious Pluralism (2009). Heck received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Robert W. Hefner is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Hefner is a social theorist who specializes in the anthropology of religion, ethics and law (including sharia law), education and youth development, as well as the comparative study of gender, citizenship, globalization, and modernity. Hefner was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.

Riva Kastoryano is a senior research fellow at the Centre for International Studies and Research at the Sciences Po (Paris). She has also been a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research and Harvard University. A sociologist, Kastoryano conducts research on religion and nation, European identity, and transnational nationalism.