Berkley Center

Nazanin Ash is vice president for public policy and advocacy at the International Rescue Committee and a visiting policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. Previously, Ms. Ash has served as deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the Department of State, and as principal advisor and chief of staff to the first director of U.S. foreign assistance and administrator at USAID.

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.

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.

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; at Georgetown University she is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and 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.

Claudia Cubas, Esq., serves as litigation director at CAIR Coalition, managing and coordinating litigation across all three programs at the organization. Prior to joining CAIR Coalition, Claudia worked as an immigration attorney at a private law office and at the Central American Resource Center in Washington, D.C. 

Katharine Donato is the Donald G. Herzberg Chair in International Migration and the former director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the author of Gender and International Migration: From Slavery to Present (2015, with Donna Gabaccia). With Shaun Casey she led the Global Refugee and Migration Project at Georgetown University.

Ashley Feasley is director of policy for Migration and Refugee Services at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Prior to working at USCCB, Ashley worked as director of advocacy for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. She has taught at Fordham University School of Law and at the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University of America. 

Elizabeth Ferris is a research professor at and director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. In 2016, she also served as the senior advisor to the UN General Assembly’s Summit for Refugees and Migrants in New York and from 2020 to 2021 as an expert advisor to the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a senior fellow and co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement and spent 20 years working in the field of humanitarian assistance, most recently in Geneva, Switzerland, at the World Council of Churches. She has written extensively on humanitarian issues and has worked on issues around disaster displacement and climate migration since 2010. Her latest book—Refugees, Migration and Global Governance: Negotiating the Global Compacts (with Katharine Donato)—was published by Routledge in July 2019. Ferris is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.