Professor Scott Atran is Research Director in Anthropology at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, Institut Jean Nicod-Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. He also holds positions as Presidential Scholar, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York; Adjunct Professor Psychology and Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Director of Research, ARTIS Research and Risk Modeling. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University (and an M.A. in...

Professor Scott Atran is Research Director in Anthropology at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, Institut Jean Nicod-Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. He also holds positions as Presidential Scholar, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York; Adjunct Professor Psychology and Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Director of Research, ARTIS Research and Risk Modeling. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University (and an M.A. in...

Evelyn Bush is an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University, and her research focuses on religion, globalization, gender, and human rights. She is currently a core collaborator on the "Religious NGOs at the United Nations" research project, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and housed at the University of Kent. She is also currently engaged in research on religious freedom and U.S. foreign...

Human rights concerns continue to occupy a central role in contemporary politics and NGOs. They also appear frequently in the teaching and research of university faculty. But do policy makers and professors speak the same language when they discuss human rights? This talk looks at the assumed breakdown in the discourses of human rights practitioners and humanities theorists, and shows that the insights of human rights theory indeed play a major role in human rights policy. By analyzing a...

American power around the world is facing new challenges, and our government is often paralyzed by gridlock. How did we get here, and how do we fix it? Andrew Bacevich, a former Army officer, bestselling author, and professor of international relations and history at Boston University, will address these questions in his free public lecture “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.” The lecture, part of the Center's Alternative Visions lecture series, will take place Thursday,...

The death of Pat Tillman elicited both heart-felt eulogy and white-hot controversy from a nation divided by war, politics, and religion. In this talk, Jonathan Ebel offers a framework for making sense of the Tillman tragedy and its aftermath, a model that encourages us to see Tillman not as exceptional or unique, but as a twenty-first century embodiment of a figure, the G.I. Messiah, who has loomed large in American perceptions of the soldier since the early twentieth century. Jonathan Ebel...

Zillah Eisenstein has been Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York for the last 35 years and is currently a Distinguished Scholar in Residence. She at present writes regularly for Al Jazeera.com and FeministWire.com. Throughout her career her books have tracked the rise of neoliberalism both within the U.S. and across the globe. She has documented the demise of liberal democracy and scrutinized the growth of imperial and militarist globalization. She has also critically written...

Dr. Ranabir Samaddar is the Director of the Calcutta Research Group, and belongs to the school of critical thinking. He has pioneered, along with others, peace studies programmes in South Asia. He has worked extensively on issues of justice and rights in the context of conflicts in South Asia. The much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue (Ashgate, 2004) was the culmination of his work on justice, rights, and peace. His particular researches have been on migration and refugee studies, the...

Amyn B. Sajoo is a scholar-in residence at Simon Fraser University, where he lectures in politics, history, and ethics. As a specialist in civic culture and law, his current research is at the interface of human rights, public ethics, and religion (notably Islam), including issues of minority citizenship and bioethics. He has served as the editor since 2009 of the Muslim Heritage Series, in which A Companion to Muslim Cultures is the most recent volume. Educated at King's College London and...

Samuel Moyn is the James Bryce Professor of European Legal History in the Department of History at the University of Columbia. He works primarily on modern European intellectual history–with special interests in France and Germany, political and legal thought, historical and critical theory, and Jewish studies–and on the history of human rights. He is the co-director of the New York area Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History as well as the Editor of the journal Humanity, and has...

Michael E. Zimmerman (PhD, Tulane, 1974) is Professor of Philosophy and former Director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since his undergraduate years, Michael has been concerned about anthropogenic environmental problems. His research examines the metaphysical, cultural, ethical, cognitive, political, and religious dimensions of such problems. Like many others in the field of environmental studies, Michael maintains that a...

Kenneth D. Wald is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Samuel R. "Bud" Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Florida. He has written about the relationship of religion and politics in the United States, Great Britain, and Israel. His most recent books include Religion and Politics in the United States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, 6th ed.), The Politics of Cultural Differences: Social Change and Voter Mobilization Strategies in...

Rami Khouri is the Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Dubai School of Government, as well as a columnist at the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper. With family in Beirut, Nazareth, and Amman, and involvement with leading research centers in the US, Khouri brings a nuanced understanding of the diverse local, regional, and international issues that make conflict in...

Members of Apple Hill's Playing for Peace ensemble will be on-hand to participate in a panel discussion at the Center on February 11, 2014. They will also be performing as part of the ASU Gammage BEYOND series on Saturday, February 15, 2014. The Playing for Peace program gets musicians from around the globe together and has them communicate in ways that would not ordinarily happen in their regions or native countries. The panel discussion—moderated by Yasmin Saikia, the Hardt-Nickachos Chair...

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His areas of interest include the re-visioning and renewal of the comparative method in the study of religion, the comparative erotics of mystical literature, American countercultural translations of Asian religious traditions, and the history of Western esotericism from ancient Gnosticism to the New Age. He focuses on the more informal modern world of the "spiritual...

Ira Chernus is a journalist, author, and professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. As a journalist, he has written extensively on peace, war, foreign policy, and nationalism in the United States, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict and U.S. Middle East policy. He studies issues on war and peace and U.S. foreign policy from the perspective of a historian of religions. The former co-director of UC-Boulder’s Peace and Conflict Studies program, his research...

Though America is deeply religious, Americans know shockingly little about religion. Without a grasp of religions, we are ill-equipped to understand world affairs or the motivations of our political leaders. Stephen Prothero—“a world religions scholar with the soul of a late night comic” (Newsweek)–offers an illuminating corrective. In his latest book, The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation, Stephen Prothero considers lesser known texts that have sparked our war...

Dr. Laurence R. Iannaccone is a professor of economics and Director of the Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Society (IRES) at Chapman University in Orange County. He is also the President of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture (ASREC). He is considered one of the pioneers of the field, and one of its most staunch advocates. In more than fifty publications, Iannaccone has applied economic insights to study denominational growth, church...

Najeeba Syeed-Miller, professor at Claremont School of Theology and director of the Center for Global Peacebuilding, is a recognized leader in the field of peacemaking. Her published research has focused on mediation between law enforcement and communities, the intersections of law with religious minority communities, and interfaith peacemaking. Her track record as a peacemaker has made her a sought out advisor for state, federal, and White House initiatives, and in international conflicts in...

The role of religion in intergroup and international conflict has been the subject of vigorous debate in the media and among scholars in recent years: Does religion merely serve as a mask for struggles that are really about power and resources? Or do religions create incompatible values that lead directly to such clashes? Is the role of religion in conflict largely organizational,providing an institutional framework for funneling human and financial resources towards the perpetuation of...

Brice Laurent graduated from the School of Mines and the Graduate School of Social Sciences. He is an engineer in the Corps des Mines and teaches at Sciences Po Paris. In 2008, he joined the Centre for Sociology of Innovation where he completed his thesis devoted to nanotechnologies (Democracies on trial. Assembling nanotechnology and Its problems): the problematization of nanotechnology in Europe and the United States, in places like science museums, public debates or regulatory arenas. He...

Akeel Bilgrami is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and the former Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities, at Columbia University. He holds a bachelor's in English literature from Bombay University, a bachelor's in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, with a dissertation, "Meaning as Invariance," on the subject of the indeterminancy of translation and issues concerning realism and...

Peter Bergen is a print and television journalist and author of a number of significant books on terrorism and national security. He is the director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C., a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security, and CNN’s national security analyst. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins...

Winnifred F. Sullivan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. Trained as a lawyer and an historian of religion, she is interested in religion as a broad and complex social and cultural phenomenon that historically both generates law and is regulated by law. She is the author of three books analyzing legal discourses about religion, primarily in the context of actions brought to enforce the religion clauses of the First Amendment and related...

Fred R. Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor in the departments of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre Dame. He has been a visiting professor at Hamburg University in Germany and at the New School for Social Research in New York, and a Fellow at Nuffield College in Oxford. He has been teaching at Notre Dame University since 1978. During 1991-92 he was in India on a Fulbright research grant. He is a past president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy...