Berkley Center

Bernard “Bernie” Adeney-Risakotta is professor of Religion and Social Science and founding director and international representative at the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies in the Graduate School of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He also teaches at Duta Wacana Christian University, State Islamic University Sunan Kalijaga, and Muhamadiyah Yogyakarta University. From 1982 until 1991 Adeney-Risakotta taught at the Graduate Theological Union Berkeley, and he has since lived and taught in Indonesia. Among his many publications are Just War, Political Realism and Faith (1988), Strange Virtues: Ethics in a Multicultural World (1995), Dealing with Diversity: Religion, Globalization, Violence, Gender and Disasters in Indonesia (2013), and Visions of a Good Society in Southeast Asia (in press, 2015). Adeney-Risakotta holds degrees in Asian Studies from University of Wisconsin, in Theology and Asian Religions and Ethics from the University of London, and in Religion & International Politics from the Graduate Theological Union Berkeley with University of California, Berkeley.

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.

Juliane Schober is the director of the Center for Asian Research and Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. As an anthropologist of religion, she works on Theravada Buddhist practices in Southeast Asia, especially Burma/Myanmar. She is the founder of the Theravada Studies Group, an academic organization affiliated with the Association for Asian Studies to promote comparative and scholarly exchanges in the social sciences and humanities about Theravada Buddhist traditions in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and southwest China and globally though pilgrimage and diaspora networks. Previously, she served as principal investigator on Title VI grants for a National Resource Center on Southeast Asia and FLAS Fellowships. She is the author of Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies and Civil Society (2011). She co-edited Buddhist Manuscript Cultures (2008) and edited Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia (1997). 

Nancy Smith-Hefner is a linguistic anthropologist and specialist of religion and gender in Southeast Asia at Boston University. Her early research included projects on language, identity, and gender socialization in Java, Indonesia, as well as identity and moral education among Cambodian refugees in the United States. Her current research takes up questions of gender and sexuality among Muslim Javanese youth. Smith-Hefner is the author of Khmer American: Identity and Moral Education in a Diasporic Community (1999). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Senior Scholar Program. She holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Farina So has been with the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) since 2003. She heads DC-Cam's Cham Oral History, which records experience and coping strategies of Cham Muslim survivors under the Khmer Rouge regime. So is currently completing a Ph.D. in Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; her research monograph, The Hijab of Cambodia: Memories of Cham Muslim Women after the Khmer Rouge, focuses on experiences and responses of Cham Muslim women under the Khmer Rouge. So has joined international conferences and written newspaper articles related to genocide, oral history, Islam in Southeast Asia, memorialization, information technology, and truth commissions and has contributed writings to Searching for the Truth, Oxford Islamic Studies Online, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam. So holds a B.A. in Accounting from the National Institute of Management and an M.A. in International Affairs from Ohio University.

Siti Syamsiyatun is the director of the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies in the Graduate School of Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She also holds a permanent position at the State Islamic University Sunan Kalijaga and is the head of Globethics for Indonesia. She has been published numerous times, including: Serving Young Indonesian Muslim Women: The Dynamic of the Gender Discourse in Nasyiatul Aisyiyah 1965-2005 (2010); "Merengkuh Merapi dengan Iman"; “Women’s Freedom and Responsibility in Islam” in Freedom and Responsibility: Christian and Muslim Explorations (2010); and “A Daughter in the Indonesian Muhammadiyah: Nasyiatul Aisyiyah Negotiates A New Status and Image” in the Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies. Syamsiyatun was a participant in the International Higher Education Interfaith Leadership Forum. She earned her Ph.D. in politics from Monash University and her M.A. from the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University.