Berkley Center

Josetxo Beriain is professor of sociology at the Public University of Navarre (Universidad Pública de Navarra) in Pamplona, Spain. During fall 2018 he is a visiting scholar at Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology.

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.

Daniel Witte is research coordinator at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” and lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at Bonn University. His research interests include, among others sociological theory, theories of differentiation, and the sociology of religion.