Berkley Center

Michael Barnett is a professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Barnett previously taught at the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Macalester College, Wellesley College, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Barnett was a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research and the Dayan Center at Tel-Aviv University. He has also been a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently spending a year at the Transantlatic Academy to work on a project on religion and the liberal international order. Barnett has written extensively on international relations theory, global governance, humanitarian action, and the Middle East. He is the author of numerous books, including The Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (2011). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

Thomas F. Farr is president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute, an NGO committed to achieving worldwide acceptance of religious liberty. Farr is also a senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. From 2006 to 2018 he was an associate professor of the practice of religion and world affairs at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow at the Berkley Center; during 2017 and 2018 he was director of the Religious Freedom Research Project and from 2011 to 2016 director of the Religious Freedom Project, both at the Berkley Center. After a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Foreign Service—which included teaching at West Point and the Air Force Academy, serving as an advisor during U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva, and leading an interagency task force on verification provisions for the START II Treaty—Farr served as the first director of the U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2003.

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Timothy Samuel Shah is a distinguished research scholar in the Politics Department at the University of Dallas, as well as as a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute and the principal investigator for the Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society (FORIS) project at the Religious Freedom Institute. Previously a research professor of government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, he also served as associate director of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project, director for international research of the center's Religious Freedom Research Project, and associate professor of the practice of religion and global politics in Georgetown University's Government Department. He is a political scientist specializing in religious freedom as well as in the broad relationship between religious and political dynamics in theory, history, and contemporary practice. He is author of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott) and editor of Under Caesar's Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution (2018, with Daniel Philpott) and Homo Religiosus? Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience (2018, with Jack Friedman). Shah received his A.B., magna cum laude, in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 2002, both from Harvard University.

Alfred Stepan was Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University; founding director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion; and co-director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life until his death in October 2017.

Monica Duffy Toft is a professor of government and public policy at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government. She previously was an associate professor of public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 2004 to 2012 and director of the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs from 2007 to 2012. She was the assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies from 1999 to 2006. Her research interests include international relations, religion, nationalism and ethnic conflict, civil and interstate wars, the relationship between demography and national security, and military and strategic planning. Duffy Toft was an associate scholar with the Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Political Science and Slavic languages and literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, summa cum laude.