Berkley Center

Jocelyne Cesari holds the Chair of Religion and Politics at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; at Georgetown University she is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center on Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and an associate professor of the practice of religion, peace, and conflict resolution in the Department of Government. 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.

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.​

Abdullah Saeed is the Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is also director of the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies—a cooperative initiative of the University of Melbourne, University of Western Sydney, and Griffith University—and co-director of Melbourne's Centre for Islamic Law and Society. His publications address Qur’anic hermeneutics, Islam and human rights, Islamic law reform, Islamic finance, Muslim communities in Australia, and Islam and freedom of religion. His publications include Reading the Qur'an in the Twenty-First Century: A Contextualist Approach (2013), The Qur’an: an Introduction (2008) and Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam (2004). He was made a member of the Order of Australia in 2013. Born in the Maldives, Saeed received his B.A. in Arab/Islamic studies from the Islamic University in Saudi Arabia and his Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the University of Melbourne.