Berkley Center

Hadley Arkes is the founding director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. He is also the Edward Ney Professor in American Institutions emeritus at Amherst College. Arkes' work as an advocate and defender of “natural rights” as envisioned by the Founding Fathers and Lincoln led to the formation of the Committee for the American Founding at Amherst. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton University and been a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His publications include Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law (2010) and Natural Rights & The Right to Choose (2002). He is a frequent contributor to national news magazines and journals. Arkes also spearheaded the creation and advocacy of the Born Alive Infants’ Protection Act signed into law in 2002. He holds a B.A. from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Thomas Banchoff is director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and serves as vice president for global engagement at Georgetown University, where he is a professor in the Department of Government and the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Carroll Bogert is the president of the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focusing on criminal justice. She was previously the deputy executive director for external relations for Human Rights Watch. She oversaw the organization’s external relations and ran the communications department, drawing attention to human rights issues in more than 70 countries. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, she worked for Newsweek magazine as a correspondent, bureau chief, and editor. Bogert holds an M.A. in East Asian Studies and a B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she was president of the Student Council of the Center for International Affairs. Her B.A. thesis, on the politics of the anti-KMT opposition movement in Taiwan, received a summa cum laude and won a prize for the best undergraduate thesis on democracy.

W. Cole Durham, Jr. is emeritus professor of law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School of Brigham Young University, where he held the Susa Young Gates University Professorship. He is also founding director of the Clark Law School’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies (ICLRS) and president of the G20 Interfaith Association. He has been heavily involved in comparative law scholarship, with a special emphasis on comparative constitutional law, and is known for his contributions to protecting religious freedoms. He is co-editor of the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion and the Encyclopedia of Law and Religion (2016) and co-author of Law and Religion: National, International and Comparative Perspectives (second ed. 2019) and Religious Organizations and the Law (2024).

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.

William A. Galston holds the Ezra Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a Senior Fellow. He is also College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. Prior to January 2006 he was Saul Stern Professor at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). From 1993 until 1995 Galston served as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy.

Jeremy Gunn is professor of law and political science at the International University of Rabat and senior fellow at Emory Law School's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. He has previously held positions with Al Akhawayn University, the ACLU, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and United States Institute of Peace.

Dennis Hoover is editor of The Review of Faith & International Affairs and vice president for research and publications at the Institute for Global Engagement. Hoover has taught political science courses at several institutions, including Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. He earned his doctorate in politics in 1997 at the University of Oxford, where he wrote his thesis, Conservative Protestant Politics in the United States and Canada: The Mobilization of Evangelical Social Movements Across the Continental Divide. Hoover is editor of Religion and American Exceptionalism (2014) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Security (2013), Religion and Foreign Affairs: Essential Readings (2012), and Religion and Security: The New Nexus in International Relations (2004).