Berkley Center

Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics (LSE). His newest books are Degenerations of Democracy (2022, with Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor) and The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (2022, edited with Benjamin Fong).

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.

Seán Golden is a retired professor, former dean, and former director of the East Asia Studies & Research Centre of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, as well as a senior associate researcher at the CIDOB Barcelona Centre for International Affairs. A specialist in Chinese thought, politics, and international relations, he is the author of numerous publications in East Asian Studies as well as translations of classical and contemporary Chinese literature and thought.

Andrea Graziosi is professor of history at the Università di Napoli Federico II. He is the author of Histoire de l’URSS (2011/2012/2016); Lettres de Kharkov. La famine en Ukraine, 1932-33 (1989/1991/2007); and The Great Soviet Peasant War, 1917-1933 (1997/1998/2008); Graziosi recently published "The Weight of the Soviet Legacy in post-1991 Russia" in the Journal of Cold War Studies.

Shada Islam is the editor of the EUobserver Magazine and a former correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review. She is also a columnist for EUobserver, a visiting professor at the College of Europe (Natolin), and a Solvay Fellow at the Vrije University Brussel. 

Marlene Laruelle is research professor of international affairs at the George Washington University's Elliott School of National Affairs, director of the university's Central Asia Program, and director of its Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. Her books include Understanding Russia: The Challenges of Transformation (2018) and Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West (2021).

Mikhail Minakov is senior fellow and principal investigator for Ukraine at the Wilson Center for International Scholars' Kennan Institute and DAAD Visiting Professor at Europe University Viadrina. Minakov previously was professor of philosophy at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (2001-2018). His work focuses on society and culture, religion, and social and political imagination in Ukraine, Russia, and post-Soviet societies.