Berkley Center

Daniel Philpott is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Philpott specializes in religion and global politics, with emphases on reconciliation, religious freedom, and theories of religious actors' political behavior. He has also participated in faith-inspired reconciliation efforts in some of the world’s worst conflict zones, including Kashmir and the Great Lakes region of Africa. Philpott's publications include Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation (2012); God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, co-authored with Monica Toft and Timothy Shah); Strategies of Peace: Transforming Conflict in a Violent Word (2010, edited with Gerard F. Powers); The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and Transitional Justice (2006); and Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (2001). From 2011 to 2016, he was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project and is currently a senior associate scholar with the Religious Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.​

Timothy Samuel Shah is a distinguished research scholar in the Politics Department at the University of Dallas, as well as as a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute and the principal investigator for the Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society (FORIS) project at the Religious Freedom Institute. Previously a research professor of government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, he also served as associate director of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project, director for international research of the center's Religious Freedom Research Project, and associate professor of the practice of religion and global politics in Georgetown University's Government Department. He is a political scientist specializing in religious freedom as well as in the broad relationship between religious and political dynamics in theory, history, and contemporary practice. He is author of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott) and editor of Under Caesar's Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution (2018, with Daniel Philpott) and Homo Religiosus? Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience (2018, with Jack Friedman). Shah received his A.B., magna cum laude, in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 2002, both from Harvard University.

Monica Duffy Toft is a professor of government and public policy at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government. She previously was an associate professor of public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 2004 to 2012 and director of the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs from 2007 to 2012. She was the assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies from 1999 to 2006. Her research interests include international relations, religion, nationalism and ethnic conflict, civil and interstate wars, the relationship between demography and national security, and military and strategic planning. Duffy Toft was an associate scholar with the Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Political Science and Slavic languages and literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, summa cum laude.