Berkley Center

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.

José Casanova is one of the world's leading scholars in the sociology of religion and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center, where his work focuses on globalization, religions, and secularization. He is also professor emeritus at Georgetown University, where he previously taught in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. During 2017 he was the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the U.S. Library of Congress' John W. Kluge Center, where he worked on a book manuscript on Early Modern Globalization through a Jesuit Prism. He has published works on a broad range of subjects, including religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994), has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. In 2012, Casanova was awarded the Theology Prize from the Salzburger Hochschulwochen in recognition of his life-long achievement in the field of theology. Casanova is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Rev. David Hollenbach, S.J., is the Pedro Arrupe Distinguished Research Professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service; a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs; and an affiliated professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. His teaching and research deal with human rights, religious and ethical responses to humanitarian crises, and religion in political life from the standpoint of Catholic social thought, theology, and the social sciences. His books include Human Rights in a Divided World: Catholicism as a Living Tradition (2024), Humanity in Crisis: Ethical and Religious Response to Refugees (2019), Driven from Home: Protecting the Rights of Forced Migrants (2010) The Global Face of Public Faith: Politics, Human Rights, and Christian Ethics (2003), and The Common Good and Christian Ethics (2002). He has taught often at Hekima University College in Nairobi, Kenya, and he collaborates with Jesuit Refugee Service. From 2020 to 2022 he is a distinguished research associate with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Hollenbach is also a research associate with the Jesuit Center for Theological Reflection in Zambia. Hollenbach is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Katharina Kuffner is a scholar who has taught at the University of Vienna and been a researcher with the European University Institute.

Sabina Pavone is a researcher in Modern History at the Faculty of Cultural Heritage of Fermo. Her scholarly research has been on religious history and Catholicism, in particular focusing on the Jesuits. She is the author of a number of major works, including I gesuiti. Dalle origini alla soppressione (2009, later translated into English), which serves as a general history of the Jesuits from the Society's origins until its first suppression; Le astuzie dei Gesuiti (2005, translated as The Wily Jesuits and the Monita Secreta); and a work on the Jesuits in Russia. Pavone did her studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

Olivier Roy is joint-chair at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and Department of Political and Social Sciences at European University Institute, and heads the ReligioWest research project. He previously was head of the OSCE’s mission to Tajikistan and a consultant for the UN Office of the Coordinator for Afghanistan. He is the author, among other books, of Globalized Islam (2004), Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (2010), and Is Europe Christian? (2019).

Wei Jiang has been a scholar with the European University Institute.