Berkley Center

Andrea Blanch, PhD, is President of the Center for Religious Tolerance, a non-profit organization promoting the ideals of peace and religious tolerance. She is also a founding member of the Abrahamic Reunion, a group of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze religious and lay leaders in the Holy Land who work for peace. A former state mental health commissioner, Blanch has published numerous professional articles, book chapters, and edited volumes on serious mental illness and trauma, conflict management and systems change, and women’s mental health. She was founding director of the Collaborative for Conflict Management in Mental Health at USF and the National Trauma Consortium. Currently she works locally and internationally to promote women in leadership and to help groups and organizations resolve conflict, heal embedded social and historical trauma, and create conditions for sustainable peace. Blanch was a 2009 Yale Fellow in the Women, Religion, and Globalization program.

Anjana Dayal de Prewitt is a humanitarian psychologist whose worldview is based on a multi-cultural family background that includes Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians. Her theology is based on the Christian question of “who is thy neighbor”, and in responding to that question she has worked with women in diverse communities in India in an attempt to develop the power within to serve that neighbor. She is a practitioner scholar who has dedicated most of her professional life in the areas of psychosocial support and protection issues of women and children in disaster and conflict affected areas in her native India, as well as Maldives, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Uganda, and Puerto Rico. Currently, she is working as the with the American Red Cross as the Special Representative to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands.

Susan Hayward is a specialist on religion, peace, and human rights and a research fellow at the Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. From 2007 to 2021, she worked with the Religion and Inclusive Societies team at the U.S. Institute of Peace, partnering with faith-based and religious actors worldwide to transform violence and advance just peace with a particular focus on Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Colombia. In this role, she also sought to strengthen religious literacy within U.S. foreign policy and global diplomacy, partnering with the State Department, USAID, and the European Union, among others. From 2020 to 2023, Hayward supported the establishment and development of the Religion and Public Life program at Harvard Divinity School, building a graduate level certificate program for students seeking careers to advance religious literacy for just peace in vocations such as policymaking, humanitarian action, and organizing.

Margaret Jenkins has a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto (2010) and was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University from 2004-05. She has also worked at the UN Development Fund for Women and the Canadian International Development Agency. Her research focuses on questions that pluralism raises for governance and foreign policy in (and towards) the developing world, especially in areas of conflict. She has written about the limits of toleration in foreign policy and the challenges faced by rights-based approaches to development in diverse religious and cultural contexts. Her research also explores the philosophical beliefs and political agendas of religious and nonliberal political organizations, and examines how these groups engage with government policy and international institutions. She recently moved to Washington, DC from Hanoi, Vietnam where she was living from 2009 to 2011. While in Hanoi, she worked on several research projects and lectured at Vietnam National University.

Dr. S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana is an affiliate researcher at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. She previously served as associate director and assistant professor of the practice at Georgetown University’s M.A. Program in Conflict Resolution. Her work has addressed Muslim women’s peacebuilding initiatives, religion and conflict resolution, Islamic approaches to war and peace, and Islam and nonviolence.

Kathleen Kuehnast is a socio-cultural anthropologist and director of the Gender and Peacebuilding Center at the United States Institute of Peace, which she joined in 2008 as Associate Vice President of the Grant Program following a 15-year career in international development. Kuehnast worked extensively with the World Bank managing international research projects and advising policymakers on social development concerns, with a focus on gender related issues. Her ongoing work focuses on the increasing socio-economic disparities in Central Asia and the impact on local level conflicts. She is the author of, among others, Women and War: Power and Protection in the 21st Century (2011, co-edited with C. de Jonge Oudraat and H. Hernes). Kuehnast holds a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Minnesota and a master’s degree in education from the University of St. Thomas; her work focused on Muslim women in Kyrgyzstan.

Dr. Maryann Cusimano Love is a tenured professor of international relations at the Catholic University of America and an expert on international security and peacebuilding. She is a consultant to the Holy See Mission at the United Nations and a board member of the Arms Control Association and the Catholic Peacebuilding Network. She earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and her research focuses on just peace and just war, nuclear disarmament, religious actors and transnational networks, globalization, normative change. Recent publications include her book Global Issues Beyond Sovereignty (2020).

Monica Maher researches and teaches at the intersection of the fields of Ecumenical Studies and Social Ethics, including interreligious perspectives on gender, sexuality, and human rights, and the relationship between spirituality and ethics. Dr. Maher has worked to develop a Christian ethic of healthcare which places sexual and reproductive rights within a larger context of political and economic rights. She has participated in the international outreach and educational activities of Pastors for Peace, Partners of the Americas, and the Mercy Sisters. Currently, her research focuses on Latin American women's theological creativity in response to gender-based violence. Maher received the B.A. from Williams College, an M.A. from the School of International Service, The American University, an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary (2004). She was named a Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2004-05 and has since participated in international collaborative research on "Toward Equality: The Global Empowerment of Women."