Berkley Center

Judd Birdsall is assistant professor of the practice in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University, where he is also a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the project director of the Transatlantic Policy Network on Religion and Diplomacy (TPNRD). In addition, he is a senior advisor on the religion and inclusive societies team at the United States Institute of Peace. From 2011 to 2020 Birdsall was based at Cambridge University, where he earned his Ph.D., founded a research center on religion and international studies, and served as an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies. Prior to his time at Cambridge, he served in the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom and on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff. Birdsall is the editor of Religion & Diplomacy, and his work has appeared in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Guardian, Huffington Post, Christianity Today, and Religion & Politics. He is also a senior editor and a frequent contributor at the Review of Faith & International Affairs.

Elizabeth H. Prodromou is a visiting professor in the International Studies Program at Boston College. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. She has published a wide range of scholarly and policy-related work on the intersection of geopolitics, religion, and human rights, with particular focus on the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Her current research focuses on religious geopolitics and typologies of power, with a case study of Russian influence-building through religious soft and sharp power, as well as the effects of cultural heritage policy on institutional religious freedom and religious pluralism in the Near East. Through the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Research Project Prodromou was also part of the Christianity and Freedom Project and Under Caesar's Sword, a collaborative research project with the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame.