Participant Biographies

R. Scott Appleby, University of Notre Dame

Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1985) examines the roots of religious violence and the potential of religious peacebuilding. He teaches courses in American religious history and comparative religious movements. From 1988 to 1993 Appleby was co-director of the Fundamentalism Project, an international public policy study conducted by the American Academy of arts and Sciences. From 1985 to 1987 he chaired the religious studies department of St. Xavier College, Chicago. Appleby is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (Rowman & Littlefield 2000), and editor of Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East (University of Chicago 1997). With Martin E. Marty, he co-edited the five-volume Fundamentalism Project (University of Chicago Press). Appleby is also the author of Church and Age Unite! The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (Notre Dame 1992), co-editor of Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America (Indiana 1995) and co-author of Transforming Parish Ministry: The Changing Roles of Clergy, Laity, and Women Religious (Crossroad, 1989). He has been a fellow of the Institute since 1996, and director since 2000.

Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University

Akeel Bilgrami got a first degree in English Literature from Bombay University but defected to philosophy because he found the former too hard. He went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and there got another Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He got a Ph.D from the University of Chicago, after writing a dissertation, "Meaning as Invariance," on the subject of the indeterminacy of translation and issues concerning realism and linguistic meaning. He joined the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University in 1985 after spending two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has published a book in the Philosophy of Language and Mind in 1992 called Belief and Meaning (Blackwell). and another book published in 2006 called Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard University Press). His book Politics and The Moral Psychology of Identity is forthcoming in 2007 from Harvard University Press. He has also published various articles in Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Psychology. Some of his articles in these latter subjects speak to issues of current politics in their relation to broader social and cultural issues.

Professor Bilgrami is the Director of The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

David Blumenthal, Emory University

David Blumenthal is the Jay and Leslie Cohen Professor of Judaic Studies at the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. Professor Blumenthal took his B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He teaches and writes on constructive Jewish theology, medieval Judaism, Jewish mysticism, and holocaust studies. His previous published works include numerous scholarly articles, reviews, and eleven books including the two volume Understanding Jewish Mysticism (1978, 1982), God at the Center (Harper and Row, 1988; reprinted Jason Aronson, 1994), Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Westminster / John Knox, 1993), The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and Jewish Tradition (Georgetown University Press: 1999) and Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion (2007). Professor Blumenthal is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Religion.

Gary R. Bunt, University of Wales-Lampeter

Gary R. Bunt is Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter, and MA Islamic Studies Programme Director. Publications include Virtually Islamic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000) and Islam in the Digital Age (London & Michigan: Pluto Press, 2003). A new book is forthcoming for the University of North Carolina Press. He maintains a blog at www.virtuallyislamic.com

Bradley S. Clough, The American University in Cairo

Bradley S. Clough is the Abdulhadi H. Taher Chair in Comparative Religion at The American University in Cairo. His main areas of research specialization are Indian Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Later this year his book, titled Noble Persons Paths: Diversity and Controversy in Indian and Theravada Buddhism, will be published by Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.

Vincent Cornell, Emory University

Vincent J. Cornell is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. From 2000-2006, he was Professor of History and Director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas. From 1991-2000, he taught at Duke University. His published works include thirty articles, a five-volume set, and three books, including The Way of Abu Madyan (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1996), Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1998) and the set Voices of Islam (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger Publishers, 2007). His interests cover the entire spectrum of Islamic thought from Sufism to theology and Islamic law. He has lived and worked in Morocco for nearly six years, and has spent considerable time both teaching and doing research in Egypt, Tunisia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He is currently working on projects on Islamic ethics and moral theology in conjunction with the Shalom Hartmann Institute in Jerusalem and the Elijah Interfaith Institute. For the past five years, he has been a key participant the Building Bridges Seminars hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Shlomo Fischer, Tel Aviv University

Shlomo Fischer holds the Horowitz Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. He was awarded his Ph.D. degree in June 2007 from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in Hebrew U. in Jerusalem. He wrote his thesis on Self-Expression and Democracy in Radical Religious Zionist Ideology.

His research interests include contemporary religion; the nexus of religion, politics and class in Israel; and Jewish historical sociology, concerning which he has published thirty articles. His edited book (together with Adam Seligman), The Burden of Tolerance: Religious Traditions and the Challenge of Pluralism was published (in Hebrew)by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and by HaKibbutz HaMeuchad in 2007.

Shlomo has worked in the field of education for the past 25 years. In the past 10 years he has worked in the field  of religion, democracy and tolerance. From 1996-2007 he has been the founder and executive director of Yesodot – Center for Torah and Democracy which works to advance education for democracy in the State Religious school sector and he has been one of the founders and is on the Board of the International Summer School for Religion and Public Life which is based in Boston, Mass.  He is a graduate of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership in Jerusalem.

Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Elijah Interfaith Institute

Alon Goshen-Gottstein has been director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute, and lecturer and director of the Center for the Study of Rabbinic Thought, Beit Morasha College, both in Jerusalem, since 1997. Ordained a rabbi in 1977, he holds a B.A. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  In 1982, he did a year of research on the New Testament and ancient religions at Harvard Divinity School. He received his Ph.D. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1986.  Stanford University Press published his The Sinner and the Amnesiac: The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha ben Abuya and Eleazar ben Arach in 2000, and his Israel in God's Presence: An Introduction to Judaism for the Christian Student is forthcoming from Hendrickson Press.

Bruce Knauft, Emory University

Professor Knauft's research combines politico-economic and cultural analysis across different world areas. He is interested in issues of collective and individual subjectivity in relation to structures of social inequality and political domination or disempowerment, both historically and in the present. His current work includes consideration of comparative imperialism, neo-imperialism, and the contemporary cultural, political, and economic status of the U.S. vis-à-vis other nations and world areas. Dr. Knauft's publications have addressed issues of modernity and marginality, social and critical theory, politics and violence; and gender and sexuality.

Originally trained as an anthropologist of Melanesia (PhD U Michigan 1983), Dr. Knauft conducted two years of doctoral research among the Gebusi, a rainforest people of Papua New Guinea with whom he still maintains contact.  His seven books include The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World (McGraw-Hill, 2005); Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Edited, Indiana University Press, 2002); Exchanging the Past (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology (Routledge Press, 1996).

As Executive Director of ICIS, Dr. Knauft plans, administers, budgets, and orchestrates features of international and comparative study in Emory College, including the international seminar, fellowship, visiting scholar, and conference series; the College's world area studies programs; the Emory College Language Center (ECLC); the Center for International Programs Abroad (CIPA); and international research and travel funding for faculty.

Bruce Lawrence, Duke University

Bruce Lawrence earned his PhD. from Yale University in the History of Religions: Islam and Hinduism. His research ranges from institutional Islam to Indo-Persian Sufism and also encompasses the comparative study of religious movements. He currently serves as the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of the Humanities at Duke University, where he also directs the Duke Islamic Studies Center. His recent books have included On Violence - A Reader (with Aisha Karim); Messages to the World, The Statements of Osama Bin Laden; The Quran, A Biography; and, with his spouse, dr. miriam cooke, Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop.

George Michael, University of Virginia at Wise

George Michael is assistant professor of political science and administration of justice at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and the author of three books including, Confronting Right-Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA, The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right, and Willis Carto and the American Far Right. He received a Ph.D. in public policy from George Mason University in 2002.

Gordon Newby, Emory University

Professor Gordon D. Newby is the Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and a Professor in the Graduate Program of West and South Asian Religions. He received his Ph.D. in Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University. He has taught at Washington State University, Brandeis University, North Carolina State University, and joined Emory in 1992 as Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Chair of the Department. His research specialties include Early Islam, Muslim relations with Jews and Christians, and comparative sacred texts. Among his scholarly works are A History of the Jews of Arabia, The Making of the Last Prophet, and A Concise Encyclopedia of Islam. He is currently working on a long-term project of a multi-volume encyclopedia of the Middle East and South Asia as well as a monograph on Apocalypse and Apocalyptic among Jews, Christians and Muslims at the time of the rise of Islam.

David Novak, University of Toronto

David Novak holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor of the Study of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto since 1997. He is a member of University College, the Centre for Ethics, of the Joint Centre for Bioethics there. From 1997 to 2002 he also was Director of the Jewish Studies Programme. In 2006 he received the Dean's Award for Excellence. From 1989 to 1997 he was the Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. Previously he taught at Oklahoma City University, Old Dominion University, the New School for Social Research, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Baruch College of the City University of New York. From 1966 to 1969 he was Jewish Chaplain to St. Elizabeth's Hospital, National Institute of Mental Health, in Washington, D.C. From 1966 to 1989 he served as a pulpit rabbi in several communities in the United States.

David Novak was born in Chicago in 1941. He received his A.B. from the University of Chicago in 1961, his M.H.L. (Master of Hebrew Literature)  in 1964 and his rabbinical diploma in 1966 from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University in 1971.

David Novak is a founder, vice-president, and coordinator of the Jewish Law Panel of the Union for Traditional Judaism, and a founder and faculty member of the Institute of Traditional Judaism in Teaneck, New Jersey. He serves as secretary-treasurer of the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City and is on the editorial board of its journal First Things. He is a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Academy for Jewish Philosophy, and a member of the Board of Consulting Scholars of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. In 1992-93 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. In 1995 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion and Business Ethics at Drew University. In 1996 he delivered the Lancaster/Yarnton Lectures at Oxford University and at Lancaster University. In the fall of 2004 he was the Charles E. Test, M.D. Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Princeton University. In the spring of 2006 he was Visiting Professor of Religion at Princeton. In 2007 he was appointed a member of Assisted Human Reproduction Canada, a federal agency by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

David Novak is the author of fourteen books, the last one being The Sanctity of Human Life (Georgetown University Press, 2007). His book, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory (Princeton University Press, 2000) won the award of the American Academy of Religion for Abest book in constructive religious thought in 2000. He has edited four books, and is the author of over 200 articles in scholarly and intellectual journals.

Since 1963 David Novak has been married to Melva Ziman. The Novaks have two grown children and five grandchildren.

Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University. Before coming to Emory he taught at the University of Delhi and at Johns Hopkins.

Professor Pandey specializes in South Asia, and colonial and postcolonial history. He is the author of Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006); Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001); The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990); and numerous other single-authored as well as collaborative works and articles. He is currently working on a history of the Dalit and African-American middle classes.

Laurie L. Patton, Emory University

Laurie L. Patton is Charles Howard Candler Professor (1996) and Professor of Early Indian Religions in the Department of Religion at Emory University. She earned her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. For several years during the last two decades she has made her Indian home in Pune, Maharashtra. Her scholarly interests are in the interpretation of early Indian ritual and narrative, comparative mythology, literary theory in the study of religion, and women and Hinduism in contemporary India.

In addition to over 45 articles in these fields, she is the author or editor of seven books: Authority, Anxiety, and Canon: Essays in Vedic Interpretation (ed.,1994); Myth as Argument: The Brhaddevata as Canonical Commentary (author, 1996); Myth and Method (ed., with Wendy Doniger,1996); Jewels of Authority: Women and Text in the Hindu Tradition (ed., 2002); Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice (author, 2004) and The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (ed., with Edwin Bryant, 2005) ; Notes from a Mandala: Essays in the Indian History of Religions in Honor of Wendy Doniger (ed., with David Haberman, forthcoming). Her book of poetry, Fire’s Goal: Poems from a Hindu Year, was published by White Clouds Press in 2003, and her translation of the Bhagavad Gita is forthcoming from Penguin Press Classics Series. Her next book of poetry, just completed, focuses on the weekly parshiyot of the Jewish ritual year.

She has worked as a Fulbright scholar in Israel in 2000, and again in 2004 where she was completing research for her forthcoming book, Grandmother Language: Women and Sanskrit in Maharashtra and Beyond. She is also completing a methodological work, Scholar and the Fool: The Secular Scholar of Religion and 21st Century Publics (contracted with University of Chicago Press).

Prof. Patton served as Chair of the Department from 2000-2007, as Co-convenor of the Religions and the Human Spirit Strategic Plan from 2005-2007, and as Winship Distinguished Research Professor from 2003-06. She was the recipient of Emory’s highest award for teaching, the Emory Williams Award, in 2006.

David Powers, Cornell University

A native of Cleveland, Ohio and long-suffering fan of the Cleveland Indians, David S. Powers received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1979 and began teaching at Cornell in the same year. His courses deal with Islamic civilization, Islamic history and law, and classical Arabic texts. His research focuses on the historical development of Islamic law and its application in Muslim societies. He is the author of Studies in Qur'an and Hadith: The Formation of the Islamic Law of Inheritance (1986) and Law, Society, and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300-1500 (2002), and founding editor of the journal Islamic Law and Society.

Patrick Provost-Smith, Harvard University

Patrick Provost-Smith is Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. He received his BA from University of Washington, Seattle and his MA and PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Provost-Smith joined the Harvard Divinity School faculty in 2003. His primary interests are in the confluence of intellectual history, theology, and religious ethics in early modern Christianity, and in approaches to contemporary critical theory and continental philosophy. His research focuses on challenges to traditions of Christian thought and practice brought about by European expansion, the development of overseas empires, and Christian encounters with others in the Americas and in Asia. His current book project, Holy War, Just War: Rhetoric and Moral Argument in the Conquest of the Americas, explores how arguments over just and unjust wars were applied, reshaped, and transformed by the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century, particularly as they were appropriated by advocates for a proposal for the conquest of China that emerged from Spanish missionaries in the Philippines. Future research will continue to explore the challenges faced in the sixteenth century by Christian theologians and missionaries in understanding indigenous cultures in the non-European world, concentrating on the primary treatise of the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta on the evangelization of the Indians in Peru, and on its global reception. Professor Provost-Smith offers courses in Renaissance and early modern Christian thought, Christianity in Latin America, the history and theology of Christian missions, philosophical and theoretical approaches to religious studies, and historical approaches to contemporary issues in religion and political philosophy (e.g., just war theory, political and liberation theologies, colonialism/postcolonialism, human rights).

Dean Robert Paul, Emory University

Robert Paul is Dean of Emory College, Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies. Dean Paul was educated at Harvard College ('63), where his field of concentration was history and literature, and at the University of Chicago, where he earned his M.A. in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1970 in the field of cultural anthropology. His professional interests within anthropology include psychological anthropology, comparative religion, myth and ritual, and the ethnography of Nepal, Tibet, the Himalayas, and South and Central Asia. His extensive scholarly publications in these areas include The Tibetan Symbolic World (University of Chicago Press, 1982) and a special issue of Cultural Anthropology, "Biological and Cultural Anthropology at Emory University," which he edited. He served for many years as editor of ETHOS: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology and was president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology from 1992-1994.

After teaching appointments in anthropology at C.C.N.Y. and Queens College in the City University of New York, he came to Emory University in 1977 as associate professor in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts (I.L.A.), where he has now been a faculty member for twenty-four years. He helped establish Emory's Anthropology Department in 1979 and served as its first acting chair. He holds a joint appointment in that department. He has also served two separate terms as director of the I.L.A. In 1986, he was named Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies.

In 1987, Dean Paul began clinical training at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, located in the Psychiatry Department of Emory's School of Medicine. He graduated in 1992 and was certified by the Board on Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1997. He maintains a private clinical practice and holds an appointment as associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. In 1997, he established Emory's widely recognized Psychoanalytic Studies Program and, in 2000, received Emory's Crystal Apple Award for his graduate teaching in that program.

His book, Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud's Myth (Yale University press, 1996), received the Heinz Hartmann Award in Psychoanalysis, the L. Bryce Boyer Award in Psychological Anthropology, and the National Jewish Book Award in the area of Jewish Thought.

In the fall of 2000, Robert A. Paul was selected, after a national search, to be dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Emory, and, in the spring of 2001, after an internal search, he was selected as interim dean of Emory College for a two-year term beginning in June 2001. After a national search, he was selected as dean of Emory College in May 2003.

Kurt Anders Richardson, McMaster University

Kurt Anders Richardson is a research professor of theology in McMaster University concentrating in areas of comparative theology and scriptural reasoning, political theology and philosophy of religion. His courses and lecturing explore the intersection of religious philosophies and political life in contexts as varied as Israel, the Balkans, Iran and China. His publications include Reading Karl Barth: New Directions in North American Theology (2004) and the forthcoming Christ and Empire: Political Theology, the Human and the State.

Warren Rosenberg, Wabash College

Warren Rosenberg has been a professor of English at Wabash College since 1980. He specializes in 19th century American literature, contemporary multicultural American literature, and Jewish and gender studies. He has published articles and delivered papers on Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Henry James, Mailer, and Barry Levinson, as well as on Jewish and Men’s studies. His book Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2001.

Don Seeman, Emory University

Don Seeman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. He is also the assistant rabbi of the Young Israel of Toco Hills. He received his Ph.D. in Social and Medical Anthropology from Harvard University in 1997, and has taught at Bar-Ilan and Hebrew University in Israel. He came to Emory from Jerusalem in 2003 for a newly created position in the Ethnography of Jewish Communities, and also holds affiliations with the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Global Health at Emory's School of Public Health, and the Graduate Division of Religion. Seeman's scholarship is marked by the integration of both anthropological and textual models. His ethnography of Ethiopian Jews and former Christians ("Felashmura") living in Israel investigates moral experience and religious transformation in a weighted political context, and probes the limits of what can be said by social scientists about religious experience in its social and moral contexts. His ethnography, "Tainted Hearts," is forthcoming in the new series on Jewish Cultures of the World at Rutgers University Press. He is also currently completing the first annotated and critical translation of the ethical writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Other recent publications in the Harvard Theological Review, Social Analysis and the AJS Review have investigated the relationship between ethics and ritual theory in modern Jewish mysticism--especially Hasidism. His work on "Ethics, Violence and Divine Honor in Modern Jewish Thought" was published in 2005 by the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. In the future, Don intends to conduct ethnographic research in Israel on the ways in which different mystical schools work to shape the subjectivity of their adherents, including subjectivities of violence.

His research interests include medical anthropology, anthropology of experience, Ethiopian-Israelis, anthropological approaches to Hebrew Bible, Judaism and Hasidism, violence and extremism in Israel. He has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His publications include: "'Where is Sarah Your Wife': Cultural Poetics of Gender and Nationhood in the Hebrew Bible," in Harvard Theological Review 91:2 (1998); "'One People, One Blood': Public Health, Political Violence, and HIV in an Ethiopian - Israeli Setting," in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 23 (1999); "Bodies and Narratives: The Question of Kinship in the Beta Israel - European Encounter (1860-1920)," in Journal of Religion in Africa 30:1 (2000).

Steven Tipton, Emory University

Steven M. Tipton is Professor of Sociology of Religion and former Director of the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology as well as a Senior Fellow at Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. He received a joint PhD in Sociology and Religion from Harvard University in 1979. His current research focuses on the institutional logics of American religion and politics, and the sociology of morality. His publications include Public Pulpits; Getting Saved from the Sixties; Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, co-authored with Robert Bellah et al; and Family Transformed, co-edited with John Witte, Jr.