Berkley Center

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.

Anja Hennig teaches comparative politics at European University Viadrina and is working on a project on shifting boundaries between religion and politics. Her research particularly focuses on two areas where religion and politics in contemporary Europe collide most notably: moral politics and the political regulation of religious pluralism. Embedded in current critical debates about the secularization-paradigm, her recent book analyzes how political decision-makers cooperate with religious representatives in the course of conflicts surrounding abortion and same-sex-partnership in Poland, Italy, and Spain since 1990. She received her Ph.D. from European University Viadrina at Frankfurt/Oder in Germany and has studied political science in Potsdam, Berlin, and Wrocław.

Michael Minkenberg is the professor of comparative political science at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). He has taught at the universities of Gottingen and Heidelberg as well as Cornell University and Columbia and was the 2007-2010 Max Weber Chair for German and European Studies at New York University. Minkenberg’s research has focused on the contemporary radical right in Western Europe and the United States, as well as religion and politics in Western democracies, issues of migration, and xenophobia. He has been a member of the American Political Science Association since 1984 and is a member of the Standing Group “Extremism and Democracy” in the European Consortium of Political Research. He also serves on the editorial board of the journal Comparative European Politics.