Berkley Center

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; at Georgetown University she is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and 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.

Evelyn Finger is the religion editor of the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit in Hamburg. She created a desk at Die Zeit for religion, ethics, and philosophy under the title of “Faith and Doubt” in 2010. Finger’s enduring interests are the politics of dictatorship and totalitarianism in the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on Nazi and Communist Germany. She has also written about theater, politics, and history in divided Germany. In 2010, she taught a class on “German Literature After the Fall of the Wall” at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She earned her degree from the University of Halle-Wittenberg in Literature and Linguistics.

Nora Fisher-Onar (SFS’98) is assistant professor and director of the Bachelor of Arts in International Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests include international relations and social theory, foreign policy analysis, and comparative politics (Turkey/Middle East, Europe, Eurasia). An alumna of Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, and Oxford University, Fisher-Onar is author of Pluralism in Turkey: Islam, Liberalism and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Lucian Leustean is reader in politics and international relations at Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom, where he has been teaching since 2007. He is a senior fellow of the Orthodoxy and Human Rights Scholars Project at Fordham University. His recent publications include, as co-editor with Grace Davie, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe (2021), and as editor, Forced Migration and Human Security in the Eastern Orthodox World (2019) and Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2014).

Peter Mandaville is a professor of international affairs at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, where he also serves as the director of the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies. He was a Berkley Center senior research fellow from April 2018 to April 2024 and from 2022 to 2024 served as a senior advisor on religion and inclusive societies at the United States Institute of Peace. Previous government experience includes serving as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (2011-2012) and as a senior advisor in the department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs (2015-2016). He has also been a visiting senior fellow at the Pew Research Center. His research focuses on the intersection of religion and international affairs, with a primary focus on Islam and the Muslim world. His publications include, among others, The Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power: How States Use Religion in Foreign Policy (2023),  Wahhabism and the World (2022), Islam and Politics (2014, 2020), Global Political Islam (2007), and Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (2001). He holds degrees from the University of St. Andrews and the University of Kent and has studied at the American University in Cairo.