Board

Malachi Haim Hacohen is Professor of History, Religion, Jewish Studies, and German Studies at Duke University. His research interests focus on Central Europe and the Jewish intelligentsia, both secular and traditional. His Karl Popper – The Formative Years, 1902- 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge, 2000) won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the AHA and Austria’s Victor Adler State Prize. His Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire (Cambridge, 2019) won the Center for Austrian Studies’ Biannual Book Prize. He has published on Austrian Jewish imperial visions, European Jewish émigrés, Cold War liberalism, and cosmopolitanism and Jewish identity in leading professional journals, advancing the integration of Jewish, Austrian, and European history. He was a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and the National Humanities Center, and was Leibniz Professor at Leipzig University in 2023. He is presently the City of Vienna Fellow at the IFK in Vienna.

Dr. Zohar Maor lectures on modern history at Bar-Ilan University and Herzog College (Israel). Among his publications are a Hebrew Biography of Martin Buber (2016), “Reconciling the Opposites: Max Brod and Nationalism in Prague” in the last issue of German Studies Review and “Hans Kohn: The Idea of secularized Nationalism” in the upcoming issue of Nations and Nationalism.

Dr. Matthew Rowley earned his PhD at the University of Leicester. He specializes in the relationship between religion and violence in the Puritan Atlantic world. After graduating, he worked on the ‘Remembering the Reformation’ project in the department of history at Cambridge. He is currently working on the ‘William Wilberforce Diaries’ project at the University of Leicester and is editing a two-volume primary source reader on Protestant Political thought from Martin Luther to WWI (in connection with the Cambridge Institute on Religion and International Studies, University of Cambridge). His multidisciplinary work discusses politics, warfare, theology, religious epistemology, identity, race, slavery, law, and the communal remembrance of the past.

Yahya is the president of the I.S.A. – Interreligious Studies Academy, an association based in Italy (Milano) that since 2007 fosters education initiatives on religions, mainly Islam, through courses, seminars, art exhibitions and publications.

She graduated in Mathematics at the University of Pavia (Italy). Her main field of research is the development of interdisciplinary educational paths on “Islam and Mathematics”. On that topic, she is going to publish the proceedings of different training courses and conferences held in Rome and Milan during the last academic year. She also collaborates with the Higher Institutes for Religious Sciences (ISSR) in Milan and other Italian cities, holding training seminars for teachers in the public schools about inter-religious education and understanding. In this framework, she has published articles about the prophet Abraham in the Islamic tradition, edited by the Franciscan Edizioni Messsaggero di Padova in Padua, Italy.

Her scholarly work spans Modern Jewish Thought, German-Jewish Philosophy, Political Theology, Continental Philosophy, and Jewish Feminism. She is currently working on a monograph, Thinking with Care: Feminine Interventions into the Ethics of Dialogue. The book traces the meaning of feminine thought (Frauendenken) in the 20th century and discusses its relevance for contemporary gender discourses.

Prof. Rocío Cortés Rodríguez is an academic of the Faculty of Theology and a member of the Practical Theology area. Her work promotes interreligious dialogue, especially with Judaism, Islam, and Aboriginal traditions. Rocío has focused her career on inter-religious co-existence in societies where their religious diversity poses specific challenges. In her Master’s studies, her research examined religious coexistence among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in 10th-century Al-Andalus (Andalusia). Soon after, during her doctoral studies, she further developed on that co-existence question but now focused on the current times. Thus, in 2019, she applied the Scriptural Reasoning, a method for interreligious dialogue, to the Chilean context.

Heather Miller Rubens, Ph.D. is the Executive Director and Roman Catholic Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. Rubens is an experienced teacher, public speaker, facilitator, and scholar-practitioner of interreligious learning and dialogue. She develops educational initiatives that foster interreligious learning and conversation for the public in the Baltimore-Washington corridor and online. In her research and writing, Rubens creatively focuses on the theoretical, theological, ethical, and political implications of affirming religious diversity and building an interreligious society. She is currently working on a book entitled In Good Faith: An Argument for a Multireligious Democracy. Rubens holds degrees from Georgetown University (B.A.), the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (G.Dip.), and the University of Chicago (A.M. and Ph.D.). She has taught at Lewis University, DePaul University, and St. Mary’s Seminary, and she served as a Visiting Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary.