Berkley Center

Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.

Kyle Harper is senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. A historian of the classical world, Harper's first book, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (2011), was awarded the James Henry Breasted Prize by the American Historical Association and the Outstanding Publication Award from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. His second book, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality (2013) received the Award for Excellence in Historical Studies from the American Academy of Religion. Harper’s third book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, will appear from Princeton University Press in the fall of 2017. Harper received his B.A. from Oklahoma University in 2001 and his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 2007.

Allen Hertzke is the David Ross Boyd Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma (OU) and faculty fellow in religious freedom for OU’s Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage. He is also a distinguished senior fellow with Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. Hertzke has written extensively on religious advocacy in politics, particularly faith-motivated activism in foreign policy. His publications include Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1 Historical Perspectives and Christianity and Freedom: Volume 2 Contemporary Perspectives (2016, ed. with Timothy Samuel Shah), Religious Freedom in America: Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges (2015, ed.), The Future of Religious Freedom: Global Challenges (2012, ed.), and Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (2004). He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. From 2011 to 2016, Hertzke was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project and co-chair of its Christianity and Freedom Project steering committee from 2012 to 2013.

Slavica Jakelić is the Richard Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Valparaiso University’s honors college, as well as a senior fellow of the Luce Project on Religion and its Publics. She is the author of Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity (2010) and is currently working on two books, Pluralizing Humanism (under contract with Routledge) and Ethical Nationalisms.

Michael Kessler is executive director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, a professor of the practice of moral and political theory in the Department of Government, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law. Kessler’s research and writing focus on theology, philosophical and religious ethics, and social, political, and legal theory. He is interested in problems of law and religion, both globally and in the U.S. constitutional context. Kessler is the author of several edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology, co-edited with Shaun Casey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Political Theology for a Plural Age (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Mystics: Presence and Aporia, co-edited with Christian Sheppard (University of Chicago Press, 2003). He also wrote “Engaging Religion in U.S. Foreign Affairs,” a chapter in the Companion to Religion and Politics in the United States (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Kessler is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

David Lantigua is assistant professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought (2020) and co-editor with Lawrence Clayton of Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents (2020). During 2022, he will be on leave through the generous support of the Louisville Institute for research and writing on the Latin American dimensions of Pope Francis’ social teachings.

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.​

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.