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.

Robert F. Drinan, S.J., was a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center from 1981 until his death in 2007. The first Roman Catholic priest to serve in Congress, Drinan specialized in international human rights, constitutional law, family law, and civil liberties. He received the Congressional Distinguished Service Award in 2006. 

Jean Bethke Elshtain was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago from 1996 until her death in August 2013. She also had appointments at Chicago in political science and the Committee on International Relations. Her works have focused on the intersections of religious ethics, war, the family, feminist theory, democracy, and modern political thought. Elshtain had taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Vanderbilt University, with visiting professor positions at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University; she also held the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown University. Among her hundreds of publications are Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003) and Who Are We? Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities (2000); her 2006 Gifford lectures were published under the title Sovereignties: God, State, and Self (2008). She was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. Elshtain earned her B.A. and M.A. from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1973.

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries; one way she shares her expertise is through her blog Faith in Action. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Kathleen McNamara is a professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. Her work focuses on markets, culture, and politics in the European Union and the United States. She received her B.A. from McGill University and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is a political scientist and former president of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He has published in a variety of fields, including political philosophy, intellectual history, and constitutional law. Mehta holds a B.A. from Oxford University in philosophy, politics, and economics and a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.

Father Thomas Michel, S.J., is a visiting professor at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome. He previously taught theology at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service in Qatar and was a senior fellow with Georgetown's Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and Woodstock Theological Center. Michel has also served on the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, leading the office for engagement with Islam, as well as headed the interreligious dialogue offices of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences and the Jesuit secretariat in Rome. Ordained in 1967, he joined the Jesuits in 1971 and subsequently earned a doctorate in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Chicago.