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.

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.

Yochi Fischer is the deputy director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, where she is also a senior research fellow; the director of the Sacredness, Religion, and Secularization cluster; head of the Intellectual Journeys program; and co-director of the Intellectual Incubator for Documentary Filmmaking. Her research interests include religion, secularization, and secularism today and in comparative and historical contexts; memory and history; and the connection between research and creativity.

Ronit Irshai is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and associate professor and head of the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University, where she is a board member of the Reckman Center, which addresses women's rights, and of Kolech, a religious feminist forum.

Uriel Simonsohn is an associate professor​ in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Haifa and head of the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies.

Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. Professor Yadgar’s recent research interests deal with the theopolitics of the sovereign nation-state and the ways in which it interacts with the histories, traditions, and identities of the people for whom nation-statism claims to speak. His empirical work has largely focused on Israeli nation-statehood and Zionist ideology.