Berkley Center

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.

Most Rev. Borys Gudziak is archbishop-metropolitan of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia. Archbishop Gudziak served as founder and rector and is now president of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine; he also taught at Lviv Theological Academy. His thesis, Crisis and Reform: The Kievan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest, was published in 1998.

Dean Joel Hellman is the Dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He joined the School of Foreign Service after 15 years of service at the World Bank, where he most recently served as Chief Institutional Economist and previously led its engagement with fragile and conflict-affected states as Director of the Center on Conflict, Security and Development in Nairobi, Kenya.

John Edward Herbst is senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and served for 31 years as a foreign service officer in the U.S. Department of State. Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006 and to Uzbekistan from 2000 to 2003.

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun is a professor of ecclesiology, international relations, and ecumenism at Sankt Ignatios College, University College Stockholm, and a director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Theological Academy in Kyiv and National University in Athens, he completed his doctoral studies at Durham University under the supervision of Fr. Andrew Louth. He was a chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, first deputy chairman of the Educational Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church, and later a research fellow at Yale and Columbia Universities, visiting professor at the University of Münster in Germany. He is an international fellow at Chester Ronning Centre for the study of religion and public life at the University of Alberta in Canada and an invited professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Hovorun is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Oksana Markarova is the current ambassador of Ukraine to the United States, serving since 2021. Prior to her current appointment, she served in Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance as first deputy minister and government commissioner on investments and as a minister of finance.

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries; one way she shares her expertise is through her blog Faith in Action. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.