Berkley Center

David Little, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center, is a leading authority on the history of religious freedom, ethics and human rights, and religion and conflict resolution. Little retired in 2009 as T.J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict at Harvard Divinity School and as an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Until summer 1999, he was senior scholar in religion, ethics, and human rights at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). From 1996 to 1998, he was member of the Advisory Committee to the State Department on Religious Freedom Abroad. Little’s publications include several volumes in the USIP series on religion, nationalism, and intolerance, as well Religion and Nationalism in Iraq: A Comparative Perspective (2007, with Donald K. Swearer), and Peacemakers in Action: Profiles of Religion in Conflict Resolution (2007). Little was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom 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.

Jasjit Singh has been the Executive Director of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF) since 2009. He has provided numerous presentations on racial profiling, employment discrimination, and community challenges to various audiences, including the US Assistant Attorney General, FBI Director, TSA Administrator, and EEOC Chairman. He currently serves on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano’s Faith-Based Initiative and has appeared in media outlets including the New York Times, Politico, Washington Post, Huffington post, National Public Radio, and CBS Radio. He is an active member of his community, serving as a camp counselor and instructor at Sikh Youth Camps for the last 10 years. He was the founder and president of the Sikh Student Association at the University of Illinois. Prior to joining SALDEF, Jasjit worked at the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte & Touche for 5 years. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Hannah Smith joined the Becket Fund in 2007 following US Supreme Court clerkships for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. With the Beckett Fund, she has argued religious liberty cases at the trial, appellate, and US Supreme Court levels. She currently serves as a member of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society International Board and as an editorial advisory board member for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Utah, for which she also writes a regular column on religious liberty issues. Smith graduated from Brigham Young University Law School with honors, where she served as executive editor of the BYU Law Review, a research assistant for the BYU International Center for Law and Religion Studies, and as president of the BYU Federalist Society. She served as a full-time volunteer missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in France and Switzerland.

Roger Trigg, of St Cross College, Oxford, is senior research fellow in the Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford, and a member of Oxford's faculties of philosophy and of theology and religion. From 2007 to 2011 he served as co-principal investigator in an Oxford-based research project on the cognitive science of religion. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Warwick. Trigg has been president of the British Society for Philosophy of Religion and European Society for Philosophy of Religion; he also chaired the National Committee for Philosophy and its successor, the British Philosophical Association. Trigg was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. His recent publications include Morality Matters (2004), Religion in Public Life: Must Faith be Privatized? (2007), Equality, Freedom and Religion (2011), and Religious Diversity: Philosophical and Political Dimensions (2014); he is also the author of the 2010 Theos report “Free to Believe? Religious Freedom in a Liberal Society.”