Berkley Center

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, where he focuses on cross-cultural human rights issues, with an emphasis on Islam. He is also a faculty member of the Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Emory University Center for Ethics. He directs projects on women and land in Africa and Islamic family law. During the fall 2009 semester he was a visiting professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, where he taught "The Future of Islamic Law," and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center. He is the author of African Constitutionalism and the Role of Islam (2006), Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a (2008), and What is an American Muslim? Embracing Faith and Citizenship (2014). An-Na'im holds LL.B. degrees from the University of Khartoum and the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in law from the University of Edinburgh.

Daniel Brumberg is an associate professor of government and director of democracy and governance studies at Georgetown University. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy. His work focuses on political, social and economic change in the Middle East and wider Muslim World.

Jean Bethke Elshtain was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago from 1996 until her death in August 2013. She also had appointments at Chicago in political science and the Committee on International Relations. Her works have focused on the intersections of religious ethics, war, the family, feminist theory, democracy, and modern political thought. Elshtain had taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Vanderbilt University, with visiting professor positions at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University; she also held the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown University. Among her hundreds of publications are Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003) and Who Are We? Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities (2000); her 2006 Gifford lectures were published under the title Sovereignties: God, State, and Self (2008). She was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. Elshtain earned her B.A. and M.A. from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1973.

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.

Brian Grim is president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation and a leading expert on the socioeconomic impact of restrictions on religious freedom and international religious demography. Grim served as 2015-2016 chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Role of Faith and works closely with the Business for Peace platform of the United Nations Global Compact. From 2006 to 2014 Grim directed the largest social science effort to collect and analyze global data on religion at the Pew Research Center. He also worked for two decades as an educator in the former Soviet Union, China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. He is author of numerous articles and books, including The Price of Freedom Denied (2010), and writes the Weekly Number blog. He was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2014 to 2016. Grim holds a doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University.

Allen Hertzke is the David Ross Boyd Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma (OU) and faculty fellow in religious freedom for OU’s Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage. He is also a distinguished senior fellow with Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. Hertzke has written extensively on religious advocacy in politics, particularly faith-motivated activism in foreign policy. His publications include Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1 Historical Perspectives and Christianity and Freedom: Volume 2 Contemporary Perspectives (2016, ed. with Timothy Samuel Shah), Religious Freedom in America: Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges (2015, ed.), The Future of Religious Freedom: Global Challenges (2012, ed.), and Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (2004). He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. From 2011 to 2016, Hertzke was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project and co-chair of its Christianity and Freedom Project steering committee from 2012 to 2013.

Gerald F. Hyman is a senior advisor and president of the Hills Program on Governance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His expertise is in democracy, governance, and rule of law.

Jennifer A. Marshall is vice president for the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity and the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where she oversees research on issues ranging from marriage, life, and religious liberty to health, education, and welfare to the application of America’s founding principles to today’s challenges.