Berkley Center

Shaun Casey is a senior fellow with the Luce Project on Religion and Its Publics at the University of Virginia and a Pulaski Institution non-resident fellow. He served as director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and professor of the practice in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 2017 to 2021. He previously was U.S. special representative for religion and global affairs and director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs. He has also served as professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and held positions at the Center for American Progress and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Casey has written on the ethics of the war in Iraq, as well the role of religion in American presidential politics. He is the author of The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 (2009) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology (forthcoming, with Michael Kessler); he is writing a book on ethics and international politics tentatively titled Niebuhr’s Children. Casey holds a B.A. from Abilene Christian University, MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and M.Div. and Th.D. in religion and society from Harvard Divinity School.

Ayesha Chaudhry is associate professor of Islamic studies and gender studies at the University of British Columbia and a 2015-2016 Rita E. Hauser Research Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her research focuses on Islamic law, Qur’anic exegesis, and feminist hermeneutics. She is the author of Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender (2013) and is currently collaborating on a book project on interfaith feminist hermeneutics; she has also published in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Feminist Theology, and the Journal for Comparative Islamic Studies. She is an Early Career Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and recipient of the Research Mentorship award for her “Living Islam Between Text and Practice: A Case Study of Domestic Violence” project. Chaudhry received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto and Ph.D. from New York University’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

Peter Danchin is professor of law and co-director of the International and Comparative Law Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. His scholarship focuses on competing conceptions of the right to freedom of religion and belief in international legal theory and on tensions between liberal and value pluralist approaches. From 2000 to 2006 he served as director of the human rights program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He has also been a fellow at the Center for Theological Inquiry and University of Cape Town. Danchin's publications include, among others, Protecting the Human Rights of Religious Minorities in Eastern Europe (2002) and "The Emergence and Structure of Religious Freedom in International Law Reconsidered" (Journal of Law and Religion, 2008). He also is a scholar with the Henry R. Luce Foundation-funded "Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Norms and Local Practices" project. Danchin earned a B.A. and LL.B. from the University of Melbourne and LL.M. and JSD from Columbia Law School.

Erik Owens is associate director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and an associate professor of the practice in theology and international studies at Boston College. His research explores the intersections between religion and public life, particularly the challenge of fostering the common good of a religiously diverse society. Owens previously worked at the University of Chicago and DePaul University, as well as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the City of Chicago’s Board of Ethics. He is the co-editor of three books: Gambling: Mapping the American Moral Landscape (2009); Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning (2004); and The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics (2003). He is a member of the American Academy of Religion's Committee on the Public Understanding of Religion. Owens was a 2015-2016 Berkley Center research fellow. He earned a B.A. from Duke University, M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Mara Willard is assistant professor of religious studies at the ‎University of Oklahoma, where she is also an affiliated faculty member in both Jewish studies and women's and gender studies. She specializes in Christian studies and theories and methods in religious studies, particularly religious and political thought in Hannah Arendt, religion and the modern West, religion and society, and theories and methods in religious studies. Willard has also taught at Harvard Divinity School and Tufts University. She has published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, the on-line journal Religion & Politics, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Willard received her B.A. with distinction from Swarthmore College, M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and Ph.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.