Participants

Dr. Ayman Agbaria is a researcher, poet, playwright, and social activist. He is the Head of the Education, Society and Culture M.A program at the University of Haifa. Previously, he served as a visiting scholar at the Institute of Education in London, and at the Institute for Islamic Studies at the University of Vienna. His areas of expertise include: education among ethnic and religious minorities; policy and pedagogy for civics education; Islamic education; and teacher training. Ayman’s poems have been published in many anthologies in various languages and four of his plays have been produced.

Imam Antepli completed his basic training and education in his native Turkey. From 1996-2003 he worked on a variety of faith-based humanitarian and relief projects in Myanmar (Burma) and Malaysia with the Association of Social and Economic Solidarity with Pacific Countries. He is the founder and executive board member of the Association of College Muslim Chaplains (ACMC) and a board member of the Association for College and University Religious Affairs (ACURA). From 2003 to 2005 he served as the first Muslim chaplain at Wesleyan University. He then moved to Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, where he was the associate director of the Islamic Chaplaincy Program & Interfaith Relations, as well as an adjunct faculty member. He previously served as Duke University first Muslim chaplain from July 2008 to 2014. In his current work at Duke, Antepli engages students, faculty, and staff across and beyond campus through seminars, panels, and other avenues to provide a Muslim voice and perspective to the discussions of faith, spirituality, social justice, and more. Imam Antepli also serves as a faculty member in the Duke Divinity School, teaching a variety of courses on Islam and Muslim cultures.

A graduate of the Hebrew University and the University of Chicago, Ariel completed a doctorate degree in History of Christianity. His research focuses on Christian-Jewish relations in the modern era, Christians and Palestine, New Christian and Jewish Religious Movements, and the effect of the counterculture on Religion in America. Ariel’s book, Evangelizing the Chosen People, won the Outler Prize of the American Society of Church History. His latest book, An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews, was published by New York University Press (2013).

Paul Ariese is researcher and senior lecturer Exhibition Development at the Reinwardt Academy for Cultural Heritage (Amsterdam University of the Arts). He is a graduate of the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies (MA with distinction) and was also trained as architectural and graphic designer (BA). Since 1997, Ariese worked on numerous projects for museums, visitor centers and heritage institutions all over the Netherlands, next to museum projects and museum capacity building programs in the Middle East, East Africa, and South(east) Asia. At the Reinwardt Academy, he lectures amongst others on heritage and religion. His research focuses on cross points / tipping points of religious space and narrative exhibition space. .

Dr. Skender Asani is the director of the Institute for Cultural and Spiritual Heritage of Albanians in Macedonia, since 2014. He is also the co-founder and President of the NGO Acta Non Verba, an NGO with a mission to improve society and promote civil society and local communities. The NGO also works to strengthen interethnic and interreligious relations; promote health care and protect the rights of women, children, minorities; encourage ethical and moral values; promote development and environmental protection; promote development of sports and recreational activities; protect cultural heritage of the communities in the Republic Macedonia; and combat anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism and hate speech. Asani has been project coordinator for the project “Dealing with the past – History and politics,” supported by the United States Department of State – Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and a participant in the research trip for the project “Civil Courage in Difficult Times.” With the Institute and NGO’s, Dr. Asani has helped to organize projects including a book promotion in Skopje of the memoirs of Mimi Kahmi Ergas-Faraggi, My life under the Nazi Occupation, and in Scadar, Macedonia, Participating in The Beit Project, a European and Mediterranean project promoting social cohesion..

His main field of research and instruction is modern German history, with a focus on the history of nineteenth century German political and religious thought. Recently Doron was a research fellow at the History Faculty in Oxford University. He published in Germany his book about Prussian conservatism, and he is also the author of a series of articles in international journals. Currently he is writing a book about German neo-pietism, Jews and nationalism.

  Since 2012 she has served as Chair of the Study of Religion program and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA. Her most recent monograph, The Family of Abraham: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Interpretations (Harvard University Press, 2014), was translated into Turkish (2015). Her other monographs and edited works include: Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of the First Arab (SUNY, 2006), winner of a Koret Foundation Award, Judaism in its Hellenistic Context (Brill, 2004), Current Trends in the Study of Midrash (Brill, 2006), the co-edited work, The Talmud in its Iranian Context (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), and most recently the co-edited volume, Islam and Its Past (Oxford University, 2017). Bakhos is currently working on editing the second volume of the ten-volume Posen Jewish Anthology of Culture and Civilization (Yale University Press).

A graduate of North Carolina State Univeristy, Michael Bazemore wrote his Master’s thesis on eleventh-century heresy, exploring the interactions between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, as well as between religion and the emerging state in France, with an eye towards understanding how and why certain groups and their beliefs came to be labeled heterodox.  He remains interested in the ways orthodoxy and heterodoxy define one another, and the relationships between orthodoxy, canon, and normative religious practices in the Middle Ages and beyond.  He is also interested in the varieties of American religion and American Civil Religion and their interaction with political structures.  In addition to History, he also holds a Master of Arts in Teaching, also from North Carolina State University.

 She was trained in Religious Studies, Protestant Theology and Jewish Studies at the University of Heidelberg, the College of Jewish Studies Heidelberg and the University of Zurich. She completed her PhD. on George Tabori (1914-2007), a Hungarian born Jewish writer and theater director, at the University of Heidelberg, where she also served as a Research Associate. Her doctoral thesis addresses ritual and religious constructions in Tabori’s Holocaust play “The Cannibals” (New York City 1968) and “Die Kannibalen” (West-Berlin 1969). Her interests focus on the post-Holocaust German-Jewish theater as well as on Material Religion, especially the representation of religion(s) in museums. She is currently developing a project on discourses of the Jewish-Christian dialogue in Germany and the US. 

Dr. Katherine Brown is Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies in the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham. She is interested in Muslim women’s involvement in violent religious politics, specifically Islam. Her work examines the ways in which gendered jihadi narratives motivate and enfranchise, and how they combine with everyday experiences of living and politics. She also examines how counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation programmes impact on religious women’s rights and Muslim communities. She is currently finishing a volume on gender and anti-radicalisation measures worldwide, as well as working on articles looking at gender in the Utopian and apocalyptic visions of the Islamic state group, Daesh.

James Chappel is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. He studies the intellectual, political, and religious history of modern Europe. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled “Spiritual Welfare: Catholic Political Economy in Twentieth Century Europe” (forthcoming from Harvard University Press). This work studies Catholic social-economic thought as a transnational whole, arguing that it had massive and overlooked impact on the shape of post-1945 Europe, where its influence was mediated through the new Christian Democratic parties that swept to power across the continent. He is also working, as a second project, on the institutional and social-scientific consolidation of the family in post-1945 Europe, and is particularly interested in how the “problem of aging” is conceived and administered.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Deeg, born in 1972, is a pastor of the Lutheran Church and holds the chair for Practical Theology at Leipzig University in Germany. He concentrates on the fields of worship and homiletics, as well as for many years on Jewish-Christian dialogue. In 1995/96 he pursued Jewish studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem – a starting-point for his continuous engagement in the theory and practice of Jewish-Christian encounter. In his dissertation (Predigt und Derascha) he reread traditional Jewish hermeneutics in the light of contemporary homiletical questions. Deeg is (among others) the director of the Lutheran Institute of Liturgical Studies, the Secretary of Societas Homiletica and one of the editors of the International Journal of Homiletics.

 She graduated in Mathematics at the University of Pavia (Italy). Her main field of research is about the development of inter-disciplinary 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. 

Dr. Ari Geiger is a member of the Department of General History in Bar Ilan University. His fields of interest are intellectual and religious history of Medieval Europe and specifically the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in the Middle Ages. His field of expertise is Christian Hebraism, especially in the aspect of Christian exegesis and its relations with Jewish biblical interpretation. He published several articles on medieval Christian scholars and Jewish literature. He is now working on a book entitled “Hebraism in the Absence of Hebrews: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Hebraism in Fourteenth-Century France”.

His research focuses in particular on intellectual, religious, and political history in the twentieth century. His first book is “The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War” (Princeton UP, 2015). He is currently working on a second book-length project that explores the transformation of Catholic-Protestant relations in Europe in the twentieth century, from animosity to friendship.

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.

Dirk Hartwig is junior lecturer at the Centre for Islamic Theology at the University of Münster and at the same time research assistant at the “Corpus Coranicum” project of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. He was trained in Hebrew and Judaic Studies, Arabic Language and Literature and Iranian Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the New York University and the University of St. Andrews. He is mainly interested in the intersections of cultures, religions, languages and literatures, and their crosspolinations. His current research is mainly dedicated to the study of the Qur’an and Islamic Exegesis, where he successfully maps the continuous negotiation/s with the traditions of the Jews, i.e. Rabbinic literature, and traditions of early Christianity, i.e. the writings of the Church fathers. Unlike many Western scholars, he does not understand the Qur’an as a replica of the Judaeo-Christian Bible/s, but rather as – what Harold Bloom has called – conscious misreading, witnessing the drama of the formation of a new community in negotiation and competition with Jewish and Chrisian traditions. In his research, which is indebted to the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Qur’an becomes visible as a theologically challenging text and as the result of an initial religious revelation, which is subject to human development. He also teaches courses in Qur’an and Qur’anic Studies at the University of Münster and the al-Maktoum College of Higher Education (Dundee), bringing together a confessional approach/es to the Holy Text with the findings of the ‘critical’ school of Qur’anic Studies.

Árpád v. Klimó is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. He teaches Modern European History and does research on the history of 19th and 20th century Hungary, Italy and Germany. Most recently, he has published the Routledge History of Hungary since 1945 (2018) and the monograph “Remembering Cold Days. The 1941 Novi Sad Massacre, Hungarian Politics and Society (1941-89” (Pittsburgh UP, 2018). Currently, he is working on a project on “Cardinal Mindszenty and Anticommunism in the time of detente West Germany, Portugal, South Africa and Venezuela (1971-75).

Abdeslam E. M. Maghraoui is associate professor of the practice of political science at Duke University. He is core faculty in the Duke Islamic Studies Center and Duke University Middle East Studies Center. His research focuses on the interactions between culture and politics in the context of Arab and Muslim majority countries. His work encompasses three overlapping areas of research: “political identity,” “political institutions,” and “political behavior and attitudes.” His work on political identity investigates the tensions between the modern notion of citizenship and competing social identities in the Middle East. His research on institutions examines how autocratic Arab monarchies, which draw legitimacy from inherited tradition use modern institutions to reproduce non-democratic forms of domination. His work on political attitudes explores the tensions between conformity to group norms and the quest for individual autonomy among youths in predominantly Muslim societies. The common thread among these three areas of research is an exploration of the central role of language as a tool to assert identity, renew authoritarian relations, and claim individual autonomy.

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.

Ellen McLarney is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her training is in Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies — at the intersection of cultures, languages, peoples, civilizations, and literatures. Her early research was on the Arabic novel, as a vehicle of cross-cultural fertilization under the conditions of colonial modernity, but also as an alternative vision of indigenous political and cultural expression. Her current project uses a cultural studies approach to analyze the media networks cultivated by Islamic communities and institutions in Latin America, as well as related cultural output—films dubbed into Spanish from Farsi and Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese literature revolving around Islamic themes, transnational connections between Beirut and Brazil in the art world, Latin American political movements that invoke Palestine, and a shared political vocabulary of decolonization, social justice, and liberation theology that articulates not just South-South solidarities, but also the contours of a contemporary Latin American Islam.

Julie Mell is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. She teaches courses in medieval history and Jewish history. Her research focuses on the Jewish communities in medieval Europe. Her book The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender (Palgrave, 2017) challenges commonplace narratives about Jews and their moneylending function in the commercialization of Europe. She has published articles in Jewish History, Jewish Historical Studies, and the Wiener Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte Kultur und Museumswesen, and received fellowships from the Yad HaNadiv, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the American Association of University Women.

Alberto Melloni is a full professor of History of Christianity in the University of Modena-Reggio, Director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies, Chair holder of the Unesco Chair on Religious Pluralism and Peace at theUniversity of Bologna and Senior Advisor at the Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia Treccani, in Rome. He serves on the board of several international journals of religion and has written numerous books on the history of the Vatican. He is principal investigator for the European Infraia Rei_Res project headed by the Fondazione, and coordinator of the Resilience research infrastructure project. He spearheaded the establishment of the European Academy of Religion, a research platform which includes institutions, associations, academies, publishers, reviews concerned with the study of religion throughout Europe, the Mediterrean, Middle East, the Balkans, Caucasus and Russia. He worked on the History of the Second Vatican Council directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, and directed the Edizione nazionale dei diari di A.G. Roncalli (Istituto per le scienze religiose, Bologna 2003-2008), the Dizionario del sapere storico religioso del 900 (Il Mulino, Bologna 2010) and Cristiani d’Italia. Chiese, stato, società 1861-2011 (Treccani, Rome 2011). He has founded the series Politics and Holy See in the 20th Century (il Mulino, Bologna) and Christianity and History (Lit, Münster); he worked on the creation of the EU network on Pius XI and the EU network TRES.; he attends regularly the meetings of the World Public Forum presided by Vladimir Ivanovic Yakunin and Mikhail Seregievic Baydakov.

Dr. Hilda Nissimi, chair of the General History Department at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, is interested and has published on the subject of collective identity. She has published several articles and a book on the Mashhadi community and the importance of its memory practices on its formation since the forced conversion in 1839. She is now interested in reading Jewish and Israeli museums as an identity texts. Her research on community museums in Israel was published in Jewish Culture and History.

  Yahya has been a member a member of the Italian Minister of the Interior’s Council on Islam in Italy since 2005. Moreover, he is member of the ECRL European Council of Religious Leaders and ISESCO Ambassador for Dialogue among Civilizations.

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.

Dr. Carolyn Sanzenbacher is Honorary Fellow at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton. Her research is focused in the history of antisemitism, with emphasis on the anti-Judaic teachings of Christianity and their causal relations to the Holocaust. Her doctoral dissertation examined the role of the Jewish Question in ecumenical Protestant aspirations for world expansion of Jewish evangelization in the years immediately before, during, and after the Holocaust. She is currently in the last stage of a book on relations between Christian organizational understanding of antisemitism and Christian organizational responses to antisemitism during the Hitler years. The work examines the network of international bodies that constituted the Protestant ecumenical movement of the early twentieth century, the streams of thought on antisemitism that flowed through its channels, and formal organizational protests against antisemitism between 1933 and 1945. She is part of the Parkes Institute outreach team on Christian-Jewish relations, and is presently involved in a study on challenges to post-Holocaust Christian-Jewish dialogue.

Benjamin Schewel is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the Univeristy of Virginia and a Fellow at the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization at the University of Groningen.

Shahrzad Sabet is a political scientist and Fellow at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. Her research and training span political science, political philosophy, economics, and psychology. Her current book project addresses the conceptual and philosophical tensions around social identity, and the surging identity politics to which they give rise. Drawing on empirical research in psychology, she makes the case for a reimagined cosmopolitanism that serves to fundamentally protect and liberate our “bounded” social identities from their otherwise inherent instabilities and contradictions. She has held positions at Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Harvard University, where she received her PhD from the Department of Government and was an associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Her work has been featured in outlets such as the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Noah Strote is Assistant Professor of History at North Carolina State University and received his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2011 and has also studied at Columbia University in the City of New York and the Humboldt University of Berlin. He offers lectures in modern European history and German history, as well as seminars in selected topics such as Fascism and National Socialism, imperialism, the Holocaust, and the Cold War.

Maja Susha is co-founder and Deputy President of NGO Acta Non Verba and Researcher and Educator for the Holocaust Fund of the Jews of Macedonia. She is deeply involved with interfaith dialogue and combatting anti-Semitism, working on projects such as “Dealing with the past,” March of the Living and telling the story of the Holocaust through children’s eyes. Through her NGO she has expanded her interfaith outreach to advance religious freedom and cooperation between various religious and ethnic groups in Macedonia. She was invited to present her work at the State Department in November, 2018 at Washington DC. She organized and attends many international conferences and published several scientific studies. Ms. Susha was born in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia and graduated in her hometown at the State University Saints Cyril and Methodius University. She believes in continuing to advocate for better interactions among the religious and non-religious people of Macedonia and for interfaith dialogue.

Todd Weir is Professor of History of Christianity and Modern Culture at the University of Groningen, where he also directs the new Centre for Religion and Heritage. Prior to his move to the Netherlands in 2016, Todd taught history for nine years at Queen’s University Belfast. He published a study on Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession in 2014 with Cambridge University Press. His next major research project will be a transnational history of the term “worldview” from 1790 to the present.

Joachim Willems is a professor of Religious Education Studies at the Institute of Protestant Theology at the University of Oldenburg.