Board

Malachi H. Hacohen is Professor of History, Political Science and Religion, a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and a Bass Fellow at Duke University. He is the director of the Religions and Public Life Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics . He teaches European intellectual history and Jewish history. He has previously taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Reed College. His research interests focus on Central Europe and include social theory, political philosophy, and rabbinic literature – Midrash to Kabbalah to halakhic responsa. Hacohen writes on the Central European Jewish intelligentsia, the European nation state vs. empire, Jewish-Christian relations, and the dilemmas of writing Jewish European history that is both cosmopolitan European and authentically Jewish. He is presently completing a book in Jewish European history focusing on the biblical story of Jacob and Esau (Jews and Christians) as it is told through the ages. Chapters include the biblical and rabbinic period, medieval & early modern Judaism, Jewish emancipation, the European nation state and the Central European Jewish intelligentsia, the Austrian Empire and the Jews, post-Holocaust Europe and the State of Israel. Some of Hacohen’s recent articles deal with Cold War liberalism, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the formation of a public sphere in postwar Central Europe, and Austrian scientific culture at the turn of the twentieth-century.

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.