Berkley Center

Shaykh Arif Abdul Hussain founded the Al-Mahdi Institute in 1993 and currently serves as its director and senior lecturer in usul al-fiqh and Muslim philosophy. For over 20 years, Shaykh Arif has been at the forefront of developing and delivering advanced Islamic studies, tailored toward training students capable of addressing the needs of contemporary societies.

Katajun Amirpur is a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Cologne where she is also the equal opportunities officer of the Faculty of Humanities. Her doctoral thesis and postdoctoral habilitation were on Iranian reformist thinkers. From 2011 to 2018, she served as deputy director of the Academy of World Religions at Hamburg University. Her main research activity is Shiite Islam. 

Ali-Reza Bhojani is a teaching fellow in Islamic ethics and theology at the University of Birmingham. He is also an honorary lecturer and co-director of the Centre for Intra-Muslim Studies at the Al-Mahdi Institute. He has held academic posts at the Al-Mahdi Institute, the University of Nottingham, the University of Oxford, and the Markfield Institute of Higher Education.

Yahya Birt is a research director at the Ayaan Institute. He has 20 years of experience in public policy engagement over British Muslim affairs at community, national, and international levels, and he has written a dozen peer-reviewed academic articles on aspects of Muslim life and history in Britain. 

Giancarlo Bosetti is the editor-in-chief and one of the founders of Reset Dialogue on Civilizations and Reset, a cultural magazine he founded in 1993. He was vice-editor-in-chief of the Italian daily L’Unità. He is also currently a columnist for the Italian daily La Repubblica and a professor at University La Sapienza and University Roma Tre.

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.

Jocelyne Cesari holds the Chair of Religion and Politics and is director of research at the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; she is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, where she previously was an associate professor of the practice of religion, peace, and conflict resolution in the Department of Government. She is the T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School. Former president of the European Academy of Religion, her work on religion, political violence, and conflict resolution has garnered recognition and awards from numerous international organizations such as the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs and the Royal Society for Arts in the United Kingdom. She is a Professorial Fellow at Australian Catholic University's Institute for Religion, Politics and Society. She teaches on contemporary Islam and politics at Harvard Divinity School and directs the Islam in the West program. Cesari is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Mohsen Kadivar is a research professor of Islamic studies at Duke University's Department of Religious Studies. His main intellectual interests are human rights and democracy in Islam, classical and modern Shia theology and legal theories, Shia political thought, classical Islamic philosophy, and modern Quranic studies. An author of thirty books, Kadivar has been at Duke since 2009.