SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Richard J. Bernstein is Vera List Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. His books include Radical Evil: A Philosophic Interrogation (Polity, 2002), Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (The MIT Press, 1996), The New Constellation: The Ethical/Political Horizons of Modernity/ Postmodernity (The MIT Press, 1991), Philosophical Profiles (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), Habermas and Modernity (MIT Press, 1985), Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), Praxis and Action (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), and John Dewey (Washington Square Press, 1966).

José Casanova, co-director of the conference, is Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. He a leading authority on religion and world affairs, has published widely on sociological theory, migration, and globalization. His critically acclaimed Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994) has been published in five languages and was recipient of the SSSR Distinguished Book Award. He served as Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research from 1987 to 2007 and was chair of the department from 1996 to 2000 and 2006 to 2007. He was also Chair of the Committee on Historical Studies at The New School and has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest since 2006. He is also co-chair with of The Religious-Secular Divide conference with Arien Mack.

David L. Chappell is Irene & Julian Rothbaum Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. He is author of A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). He was previously a professor of history at the University of Arkansas. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in Moscow in l993. He has also written for The Nation, Books and Culture, In These Times, Historically Speaking, Newsday, The Washington Post, African American Review, World Policy Journal, Sekai (Tokyo), Tempo (Rio de Janeiro), and The New York Times. He is finishing up his third book, Waking from the Dream: the Battle over Martin Luther King's Legacy (Random House).

William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at The Johns Hopkins University. He is known for having applied conceptual analysis with a left-critical edge to social science concepts, and for introducing postmodern philosophy into political theory. He is also known for his 1974 book The Terms of Political Discourse, widely held to be one of the major works of political theory published in the 1970s. It is still in print. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He edited the journal Political Theory in the 1980s. He has been teaching at Hopkins since 1985. With his colleague and interlocutor Richard E. Flathman, Connolly founded what is sometimes called "the Hopkins School" of political theory. His books include Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Duke University Press, 2008), Pluralism (Duke University Press, 2005), Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002), Why I am not a Secularist (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), The Ethos of Pluralization (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Cornell University Press, 1992) and Political Theory and Modernity (Cornell University Press 1988).

Sheila Greeve Davaney is the program officer for religion at the Ford Foundation. She is currently on leave from the Iliff School of Theology where she has been the Harvey H. Potthoff Professor of Christian Theology. Davaney is the author of Historicism: The Once and Future Challenge for Theology; Pragmatic Historicism: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century; and co-editor of The Pragmatic Century (with Warren Frisina); Identity and the Politics of Scholarship in the Study of Religion (with Jose Cabezon); Converging on Culture (with Delwin Brown and Kathryn Tanner). Her scholarship focuses on historicism and pragmatism as well as feminist theology and theory.

James Davison Hunter is LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia. Most recently, he published The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil (Basic Books, 2000) and Is There A Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life with Alan Wolfe (Brookings Institution Press, 2006). In 1988 he received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion for Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (University Of Chicago Press, 1993). In 1991 he was the recipient of the Gustavus Myers Award for the Study of Human Rights for Articles of Faith; Articles of Peace. The Los Angeles Times named Mr. Hunter as a finalist for their 1992 Book Prize for Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. In 2004, he was appointed by the White House to a six-year term to the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2005, he won the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters. Since 1995, Professor Hunter has served as the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He also has been a consultant to the White House, the Bicentennial Commission for the U.S. Constitution, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the National Commission on Civic Renewal.

Daniel C. Dennett is Co-Director for the Center for Cognitive Studies and is Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is the author of Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006) and Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003). His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon&Schuster, 1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.

Noah Feldman is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. Professor of law at Harvard Law School, he is also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Feldman was Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005. In 2004 he was a visiting professor at Yale Law School and a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998). He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Islamic Thought from Oxford University in 1994. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He is the author of Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton University Press, 2004), After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), and Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad is Professor of the History of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Her books include A Vanishing Minority: Christians in the Middle East (An Annotated Bibliography), Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States, An Edmonson Historical Lecture (Baylor University Press, 2004), with John Esposito, The Islamic Revival since 1989: A Critical Survey and Bibliography 1989-1994 (Greenwood Press, 1997), and with Jane Smith, Mission to America: Five Islamic Sectarian Movements in North America (University of Florida Press, 1993). She is also a recipient of the Chancellor's Medal for Excellence in Research at the University of Massachusetts.

Susan F. Harding is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 2000, she published a study of the cultural movement that swept through many conservative Christian communities during the 1980s and 1990s, converting them from a marginal, anti-worldly, separatist people into a visible and vocal public force. She is currently writing a book on figures, texts, media events, movements, organizations, and other practices that are revoicing "the religious right" and socially conservative Christianity, creating alien speaking positions inside their discourses, and swerving and redirecting them to other ends. She is also researching, writing about, and participating in local movements to remake "retirement" and "aging" in America. Her books include Histories of the Future edited with Daniel Rosenberg (Duke University Press, 2005), The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2000), Remaking Ibieca: Rural Life in Aragon under Franco (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) and Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory edited with C. Bright (University of Michigan Press, 1984).

Janet Jakobsen is Professor and Director at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the Interim Associate Dean of Diversity at Barnard College, Columbia University. Professor Jakobsen teaches feminist and queer theories, sexuality studies, theories of women’s activism, and a course on religion, gender, and violence. Her research interests include feminist and queer ethics; religion, gender, and sexuality in American public life; social movements and feminist alliance politics; and global issues of economics and violence. She is currently working on a book project, The Value of Ethics: Sex, Secularism and Social Movements in a Global Economy. Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst and lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Her books include Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence, edited with Elizabeth Castelli ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, with Ann Pellegrini (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, as well as former Director of the Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton University and former Director of The University Center for Human Values. His books include Patriotism and Other Mistakes (Yale University Press, 2006), Emerson and Self-Reliance (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Cornell University Press, 1992), Utopia and its Enemies (Schocken Books, 1988). He is winner of the 1994 Spitz Book Prize by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought.

Arien Mack is the Alfred and Monette Marrow Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research, where she has edited Social Research journal since 1970. In 1988 she established the Social Research conference series, which she continues to direct. The twenty-first conference on limits of knowledge is currently in planning for 2010. Professor Mack is also the founder and director of the Journal Donation Project, which assists in rebuilding major research and teaching libraries in countries that have fallen victim to political or economic deprivation, and often both, through the provision of current subscriptions and back volume sets of English-language scholarly, professional and current events journals. In 2007, she launched the Endangered Scholars Worldwide initiative. As a research psychologist, Professor Mack's current interests focus on perception, cognition, and attention. She teaches graduate-level psychology courses and oversees a research lab at The New School for Social Research. Her publications include more than 60 articles, and the coauthored volume, Inattentional Blindness (MIT Press, 1998).

Michael W. McConnell is Judge on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and Presidential Professor of Law at S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. He was nominated by George W. Bush on September 4, 2001, to a seat vacated by Stephen H. Anderson. He has taught at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years where he was William B. Graham Professor of Law. Prior to his teaching career, Professor McConnell served as assistant to the solicitor general with the U.S. Department of Justice, assistant general counsel for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and clerked for Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright, of the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He also served a clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan. Among the country's most distinguished scholars in the fields of constitutional law and theory with a specialty in the religion clauses of the First Amendment, Professor McConnell has argued 11 times before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is widely published in the areas of church-state relations and the First Amendment. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was sworn in as a judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on January 3, 2003. He was also the comment editor for the University of Chicago Law Review.

James A. Morone is Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University. He is a frequent contributor to The American Prospect and the London Review of Books and is active in policy work and has testified before Congress numerous times, especially on health policy. His awards include three Hazeltine citations for teaching (in 1993, 1999, 2001), the APSA's Kammerer Award for the Democratic Wish, and a Pulitzer nomination for The Politics of Sin in American History (Yale University Press, 2003). His other books include The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (Basic Books, 1990; Revised Edition, Yale University Press, 1998) and, with Andrew Dunham, The Politics of Innovation: The Evolution of Hospital Regulation in New Jersey (Health Research and Education Trust, 1983).

John T. Noonan, Jr. is United States Senior Circuit Judge in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where he has served since 1986. Prior to his appointment by Ronald Reagan, he was a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Notre Dame. He has a long and distinguished history of public service and served on the staff of the National Security Council during the Eisenhower administration. His published writings revolve around the relation between religion and government and include a number of magisterial studies of the history of moral thought--most notably, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Harvard University Press, 1957) and Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Harvard University Press, 1966), His most recent works are A Church that Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), Narrowing the Nation's Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States (University of California Press, 2003), The Believer and the Powers that Are: Cases, History, and Other Data Bearing on the Relation of Religion and Government (Macmillan Pub Co, 1987) and The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). He has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America, and, in 1995, received the Aquinas Medal from the American Catholic Philosophical Association. He has been a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Human Life Review, the Law and Society Review, and the Harvard Law Review. Judge Noonan joined the Center during his tenure as a visiting professor at the Notre Dame Law School as a Visiting Research Fellow. He gave a plenary presentation at the Center's "Culture of Death" conference in October 2000. In 1998, he delivered the J. Philip Clarke Family Lecture on Medical Ethics for the annual Notre Dame Medical Ethics Conference.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is Co-Editor of "Sexual Cultures: New Directions from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies," New York University Press; on the Editorial Board of Culture and Religion: A New Interdisciplinary Journal; Contributing Editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality; and was previously on the Board of Directors for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. Her fellowships and honors include the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis, Austrian Fulbright Commission and Sigmund-Freud-Society; the Arnold Grossman Award for Outstanding Faculty/Staff Service to the LGBT Community, Office of LGBT Student Services, New York University; the First Annual BGLT Faculty Ally Award, Harvard University; Nominee of the Jonathan R. Levenson Memorial Junior Faculty Teaching Award, Harvard University; National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar (Jewish Cultural Studies); Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities; Harvard University Graduate Writing Fellowship; Keasbey Scholarship, Oxford University; and the John Osborne Sargent Prize for Latin Translation, Harvard University. Her books include Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, with Janet Jakobsen (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

Adam B. Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University and Research Associate at the Institute for Culture, Religion and World Affairs there. He has lived and taught at universities in this country, in Israel and in Hungary where he was a Fulbright Fellow from 1990-1992. He lived close to twenty years in Israel where he was a member of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in the early 1970’s. His books include The Idea of Civil Society (Free Press, 1992); Inner-worldly Individualism (Transaction Press, 1994); The Problem of Trust (Princeton University Press, 1997); Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (Princeton University Press, 2000) with Mark Lichbach Market and Community (Penn State University Press, 2000); Modest Claims, Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition (Notre Dame University Press, 2004); and with Weller, Puet and Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford University Press, 2008). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He is director of the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life which leads seminars every year on contested aspects of religion and the public square in different parts of the world. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Winnifred Sullivan is Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo Law School. Sullivan is a scholar of comparative religion as well as a former corporate lawyer and advisor to the Federal Trade Commission. She was assistant professor at Washington and Lee University, senior lecturer and dean of students at the University of Chicago Divinity School, simultaneously visiting fellow at the American Bar Foundation and the Martin Marty Center, then a National Humanities Center Fellow 2006-7 (Lilly Foundation fellowship). She is the author of Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, 1995), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2005), and Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy, McGill University in Montreal, Canada; Professor of Law and Philosophy, Northwestern University. Canadian philosopher, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is known for his viewpoints on morality and modern Western identity of individuals and groups. He is a practicing Roman Catholic. Taylor is now Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University. Many of his students have gone on to be important philosophers and political theorists. Taylor was a candidate for the social democratic New Democratic Party in Mount Royal on three occasions in the 1960s, beginning with the 1962 federal election when he came in third place behind Liberal Alan MacNaughton. He improved his standing in 1963, coming in second. Most famously, he also lost in the 1965 election to newcomer and future prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. This campaign garnered nation-wide attention since both Taylor and Trudeau were considered intellectuals and "star candidates". Taylor's fourth and final attempt to enter the Canadian House of Commons was in the 1968 federal election, when he came in second as an NDP candidate in the riding of Dollard. In 1995, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2000, he was made a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec. He was awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize for progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities, which includes a cash award of 800,000 pounds sterling ($1.5 million US). In 2007 he and Gérard Bouchard were appointed to the one-year Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d'accommodements reliées aux différences culturelles, to study the social accommodation of religious and cultural minorities in Québec. His publications include A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2004), Philosophical Arguments (Harvard University Press, 1997), The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1992), Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1990) and Hegel (Cambridge University Press, 1977).

Peter van der Veer is University Professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Previously, he was Professor of Comparative Religion and Director of the Research Centre Religion and Society at the University of Amsterdam, the Dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam and Dean of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, Co-Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Chairman of the Board of the International Institute for Asian Studies and Co-Chairman of the Indo-Dutch Programme in Alternatives in Development (IDPAD). Van der Veer has taught Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research. He was awarded the Hendrik Muller Award for outstanding contribution to Social Science Research and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton University Press, 2001), Nation and Religion (Princeton University Press, 1999), Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (University of California Press, 1994), and Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre (London School of Economics, 1989). He is currently doing comparative research on religion and society in India and China.

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