Berkley Center

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.

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.

Anver Emon is a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and the Canada Research Chair in Religion, Pluralism and the Rule of Law. His research focuses on premodern and modern Islamic legal history and theory, premodern modes of governance and adjudication, and the role of sharia both inside and outside the Muslim world. Along with numerous articles, Emon is the author of Islamic Natural Law Theories (2010) and Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire of Law (2012), as well as co-editor of Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law: Searching for Common Ground? (2012). He is founding editor of Middle East Law and Governance: An Interdisciplinary Journal and a series editor of the Oxford Islamic Legal Studies Series. Emon holds five advanced degrees, including a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, M.A. from the University of Texas, Austin, and LL.M. and J.S.D. from Yale Law School.

Jonathan Laurence is the executive director of Reset Dialogues and a professor of political science at Boston College. His essays and commentary have appeared in U.S. and European periodicals and news media. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

Adnane Mokrani is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Religious Sciences in Bologna and Palermo. His scholarly work focuses on modern and classical Islamic theologies of religions, as well as Quranic studies, in particular the methodological dialogue with biblical studies, such as Semitic rhetorical analysis and narrative analysis.

Ebrahim Moosa is professor of Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame, with appointments in the Department of History and the Kroc Institute for International Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs. He co-directs, with Scott Appleby and Atalia Omer, the Contending Modernities project. His research and teaching span both classical and modern Islamic thought, with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics, and theology. He was a professor of religious and Islamic studies at Duke University from 2001 to 2014; Moosa previously taught at the University of Capetown and Stanford University and was named Carnegie Scholar in 2005. His publications include What is a Madrasa? (2015), The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring: A Season of Rebirth? (2015, edited with Charles Villa-Vicencio and Erik Doxtader), Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination (2005), and Fazlur Rahman's Revival and Reform in Islam (2000, ed.). Before entering academia Moosa worked as a journalist in South Africa and the United Kingdom. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town.

Abdulaziz Sachedina is professor and IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He has been conducting research and writing in the field of Islamic law, ethics, and theology for more than two decades. His recent publications include Islamic Biomedical Ethics: Theory and Application and Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights. 

Sohaira Siddiqui is an assistant professor of theology at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her research interests include classical Islamic legal theory (usul ul-fiqh) and political thought, the development and intersection of legal thought and political thought from the ninth to eleventh centuries, and secularism and modernity in relation to Islamic law and Muslims in the West. Siddiqui also taught a class supported through the Berkley Center's Doyle Seminars project. She is currently working on a book and several shorter projects focusing on the legal and political thought of the eleventh century jurist and theologian Abu Maʿali ai-Juwayni. She is also working on a translation of one of his shorter legal treatises and editing Locating the Shari'a: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice (forthcoming). She has previously taught Islam, Islamic law, gender and the modern Muslim world at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. She received her doctorate in religious studies from the University of California Santa Barbara.