Mustafa Akyol is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam, and modernity. He is the author of books such as Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance, and Why, As A Muslim, I Defend Liberty. He was a longtime contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and he teaches classes at Boston College, Foreign Service Institute, and Acton University. “The Thinking Muslim,” a popular podcast, defined Akyol as “probably the most notable Muslim modernist and reformer.”
Giuliano Amato, former President of the Constitutional Court of Italy, was the Italian Prime Minister in 1992-93 and in 2000-01. From 2006 to 2008 he served as the Minister of the Interior. He was the vice-chairman of the Convention for the European Constitution. He has chaired the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani and the Centro Studi Americani (Center for American Studies) in Rome. A Professor of Law in several Italian universities and abroad, he has written books and articles on the economy and public institutions, European antitrust, personal liberties, comparative government, European integration and humanities. He served as the Chair of Reset DOC’s scientific board from 2003 to 2013.
Daniele Archibugi is a Research Director at the Italian National Research Council (CNR-IRPPS) in Rome, and Professor of Innovation, Governance and Public Policy at the University of London, Birkbeck College where he teaches globalization and global governance. He works on the economics and policy of science, technology and innovation and on the political theory of international relations. He has worked at the Universities of Sussex, Cambridge, London School of Economics, Harvard and Rome LUISS and gave courses at the SWEFE University of Chengdu and at the Ritsumeikan University of Kyoto. He has also been a visiting professor in a variety of universities, including the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. In the field of international political theory, he has advocated a cosmopolitan democracy (The Global Commonwealth of Citizens, Princeton UP, 2008) and a stronger international criminal justice (with Alice Pease, Crime and Global Justice. The Dynamics of International Punishment, Polity, 2018).
Karen Barkey is the Kellogg Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Bard College. Her current work is on religion and tolerance. She has written on the early centuries of Ottoman state toleration. She is now exploring ways of understanding how religious coexistence, toleration, and sharing occurred in different historical sites under Ottoman rule and the contemporary Mediterranean. Her book, Empire of Difference explores some of these topics within a general framework of empire and state transformation. Her main project is on, a collaborative program that seeks to develop a rubric for describing, classifying, analyzing, and publishing work relating to spaces and locations used by multiple, disparate communities for religious purposes. She has also co-curated two exhibition projects on Shared Sacred Sites in Thessaloniki, Greece, and New York City, New York. These exhibitions have produced two books: Shared Sacred Sites (co-edited with Manoël Pénicaud & Dionigi Albera; New York Public Library, CUNY Graduate Center, The Morgan Library & Museum; New York; 2018) and Shared Sacred Sites in the Balkans and the Mediterranean (also co-edited, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art; 2018). An edited book, Choreography of Sacred Spaces: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution (with Elazar Barkan), explores the history of shared religious spaces in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine/Israel, all three regions once under Ottoman rule. The project provides the historical antecedents to help us understand the accommodation and contention around specific sites in the modern period, tracing comparative areas and regime changes. Her latest book with Sudipta Kaviraj and Vatsal Naresh is Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (Oxford UP, 2021). Her manuscript in progress is about Successful Religious Pluralism.
Giancarlo Bosetti is the Executive Chair and one of the founders of Reset DOC and Reset, a cultural magazine he founded in 1993. He was deputy-editor of the Italian daily L’Unità and later columnist for the Italian daily La Repubblica. He is the editor-in-chief of the web-magazine of Resetdoc.org. He has been adjunct professor of Sociology of Communication at University of Rome La Sapienza and University Roma Tre. He published The lesson of this century (Routledge, 2000), a book-interview with Karl Popper; Cattiva maestra televisione (transl. in several languages). Among his books: Spin. Trucchi e Tele-imbrogli della Politica, Marsilio, 2007; Il fallimento dei laici furiosi (2009); La verità degli altri. La scoperta del pluralismo in dieci storie, Bollati Boringhieri, 2020 (The Truth of Others, The Discovery of Pluralism in Ten Tales, Springer 2023). His latest book with Giuliano Amato and Vincenzo Paglia is Il sogno di Cusano. Dialoghi post-secolari e la politica inaridita di oggi, Baldini + Castoldi, 2024.
Craig Calhoun is a comparative and historical sociologist, social theorist, and scholar, known for his interdisciplinary work in anthropology, communications, economics, history, international studies, political science, philosophy, and science and technology studies. His latest book, Degenerations of Democracy, co-authored with Charles Taylor and Dilip Gaonkar, was published by Harvard University Press in 2022. He edited The Green New Deal and the Future of Work with Benjamin Fong (Columbia University Press, 2022) and has collaborated with former students to create widely used anthologies covering classical and contemporary sociological theory. Calhoun has authored nine books and published over 150 peer-reviewed papers, articles, and chapters. Calhoun currently serves as the University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. Prior to joining ASU, he served as president and director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, president of the Social Science Research Council, and president of the Berggruen Institute. Calhoun has taught at Columbia University, NYU, where he founded the Institute for Public Knowledge, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also served as dean of the graduate school and directed the University Center for International Studies. Calhoun’s research focuses on contemporary transformations, possible futures, and the political economy of the modern world-system. He is also committed to studying universities and knowledge institutions, democracy, and shifting structures of social solidarity. In his philosophical pursuits, Calhoun explores the relationship between transformation and transcendence in understanding human existence. Calhoun is the Director of Reset Dialogues US.
Marina Calloni is Full Professor and Chair of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of Milan-Bicocca, PhD in Philosophy and PhD in Social and Political Science. She is President of the Italian Society of Critical Theory and Director of the research center ADV – Against Domestic Violence. Calloni was advisor to the “Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Femicide and all forms of Gender Violence” at the Senate of the Italian Republic and collaborates with the Council of Europe – OCEAN (Open Council of Europe Academic Network) for the implementation of the Istanbul Convention. She was a Research Fellow at the New School for Social Research and at the Italian Academy – Columbia University. She taught at the Universities of Notre Dame, Lodz Frankfurt, Bremen, Vienna Lugano, Hannover, Kurume, and was Senior Researcher at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics. She is editor of the book series RiGenerAzioni (Castelvecchi). She is co-founder of Reset and member of the Board of Directors of Reset DOC. She is Editorial Associate at Constellations and collaborates with different journals, newspapers, and magazines. She has published in several languages more than 280 scientific works on social philosophy and political theory; human rights and fundamental freedoms; gender issues; critical theory of society; critique of violence; citizenship and public sphere; research networks and international cooperation. She has introduced the Italian edition of Habermas’ book on A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics. In 2020 the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, awarded her the title of “Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.”
Julián Casanova is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Zaragoza and Visiting Professor at the Central European University of Budapest/Vienna. In 2018-19 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and in 2022-23 Distinguished Research Fellow at the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan. He has also been a visiting professor at a number of prestigious universities in Europe and the Americas: Queen Mary College, London; Harvard University; University of Notre Dame; the New School for Social Research; and FLACSO (Quito, Ecuador). Casanova is one Spain’s foremost historians of the 20th century and one of the world’s greatest historians of the Spanish Civil War. His many books have been published in both Spanish and English and some have been translated into other languages such as Arabic and Turkish. In April 2021 the Government of Aragon (Spain) awarded him the “Premio de las Letras Aragonesas” 2020 for “his long career, the scientific quality of his texts, the vigour and agility of his essay style, his ability and willingness to communicate, and the social commitment of his work”. Casanova is also a public intellectual, contributing regularly to Spanish media on issues relating to history and historical memory. His latest book is Franco (Crítica, 2025). He served as historical advisor for Alejandro Amenábar’s prize-winning 2019 film While at War. He has supervised 36 PhD theses.
Alessandro Ferrara, Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and Adjunct Professor of Legal Theory at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, is currently Sir Percy Spender Visiting Professor at the Law School of the University of Sydney. He has served as President of the Italian Society for Political Philosophy (2005-2010) and since 1993 is a Co-Director of the Prague Conference Philosophy and Social Science. He serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Philosophy & Social Criticism and Constellations, and co-edits (with David Rasmussen) the series Philosophy & Politics – Critical Explorations, at Springer. His book Sovereignty Across Generations. Constituent Power and Political Liberalism (OUP, 2023) was awarded the “Best 2023 Book” prize by ICON-S, International Society of Public Law. With Frank Michelman, he has recently co-authored Legitimation by Constitution. A Dialogue on Political Liberalism (OUP, 2021). He also authored The Democratic Horizon. Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism (CUP, 2014) and The Force of the Example. Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (Columbia UP, 2008).
Ambassador Pasquale Ferrara is currently Political Director at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He held key diplomatic posts abroad, notably in Algiers, Santiago de Chile, Athens, Brussels (European Union), and Washington. He was Head of the Policy Planning Unit of the Ministry. From 2011 to 2016, he was Secretary General of the European University Institute in Florence. Since 2012 he has regularly taught Diplomacy and Negotiation at LUISS University in Rome. He published extensively on matters related to international relations and diplomacy.
Jeffry Frieden is Professor of International and Public Affairs and Political Science at Columbia University, and Professor of Government emeritus at Harvard University. He specializes in the politics of international economic relations. Frieden is the author of Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2007; second updated edition 2020); of Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy (2015); and the co-author (with Menzie Chinn) of Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery (2012). Frieden is also the author of Debt, Development, and Democracy: Modern Political Economy and Latin America, 1965-1985 (1992), of Banking on the World: The Politics of American International Finance (1987), and the co-author or co-editor of over a dozen other books on related topics. His articles on the politics of international economic issues have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and general-interest publications.
Fulvia Giachetti is a Postdoctoral Researcher in political philosophy at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where she is working on a project on gender cyberviolence in neoliberal societies with Prof. Marina Calloni. She received her Ph.D. in political studies in the history of contemporary political thought on the conceptual history of neoliberalism and its critique at La Sapienza University in Rome, and was a student on the doctoral excellence track of the School of Advanced Studies at the same University (SSAS). She previously graduated in Philosophy from La Sapienza University in Rome with a thesis on philosophies of political performativity in analytic and post-structuralist thought. For this thesis, she won the “Lorella Cedroni” Graduate Prize in Political Philosophy. She is currently Director of the scientific journal Polemos. Materiali di Filosofia e Critica Sociale (Donzelli editore) and redactor of the scientific journal Studi Politici (Mimesis editore). She works in international study groups “Groupe d’études sur le néolibéralisme et les alternatives” and “Néolibéralisme et école de Francfort” in Paris. She has written several scientific publications and given several lectures and seminars as an invited speaker at national and international conferences.
Carlo Invernizzi Accetti is Full Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York (CUNY); Associate Researcher at the Center for European Studies of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po); and Visiting Professor of European Politics at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). His research is at the intersection of democratic theory and comparative EU/US party politics. It combines a historical approach with a concern for contemporary normative issues, relating in particular to the relationship between politics and religion, the rise of populism and technocracy as structuring poles of electoral competition, and the ideological reconfigurations taking place in advanced Western Democracies. He has published three monographs, two edited volumes, and over two dozen articles in top international peer-reviewed journals on topics such as: populism and technocracy, political ideologies and party politics in Western Europe and the United States, militant democracy, referendums, and the philosophical foundations of human rights. Invernizzi Accetti is also a regular commentator on European and U.S. political affairs for venues including: The New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, La Repubblica, Quartz, Le Monde Diplomatique, and France 24.
Jean-Claude Kaufmann is a sociologist and Honorary Research Director at the CNRS. He is best known for his surveys, which focus on concrete aspects of daily life. His books on these topics reach a wide audience and have been translated into more than 20 languages. This fieldwork serves as the foundation for a more theoretical reflection on the individualization of society and identity mechanisms, which raise questions about the future of democracy. This is explored in three of his books (L’invention de soi, La fin de la démocratie, L’homme reconstruit), which will inform his presentation at the conference.
Fidan Ana Kurtulus is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is also a founding director of the University of Massachusetts Center for Employment Equity. She has published research on a variety of labor economics topics including the benefits of broad-based employee share ownership and democratic workplace practices and the impacts of U.S. Civil Rights legislation and anti-discrimination regulation. She is co-author of the recent book How Did Employee Ownership Firms Weather the Last Two Recessions? Employee Ownership, Employment Stability and Firm Survival?. She recently spoke at the U.S. Senate on the research evidence on the benefits of employee ownership. Kurtulus has been a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and Women and Public Policy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She has won numerous awards for her research including a Beyster Fellowship on Democratic Workplaces, and an Early Career Research Award from the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. She has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Arnold Foundation, among other sources. Kurtulus received her A.B. from the University of Chicago, graduating with high honors in economics. She obtained her Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.
Jonathan Laurence is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College. His principal areas of teaching and research are Comparative Politics and Religion and Politics in Western Europe, Turkey and North Africa. He is a former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, Wissenchaftszentrum Berlin, Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund, Fafo Institute/Norwegian Research Council, LUISS University-Rome, Sciences Po-Paris and the Brookings Institution. His last publication is Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism and the Modern State with Princeton University Press, which was awarded the prize for best book in religion and politics from the American Political Science Association. Recently he edited Secularism in Comparative Perspective (Springer, 2023) and, with Karen Barkey, The Comparative Handbook on Religious Toleration (Springer 2025). Laurence is the Executive Director of Reset Dialogues US.
Claus Leggewie is a political scientist and holds the Ludwig Börne chair. He directs the Panel on Planetary Thinking at Giessen University, Germany. Focusing on the French ecological movement, his first book on political ecology dates back to 1978. He wrote numerous publications on planet-society interrelations ever since, ranging from energy transition to climate politics to the Anthropocene. He is currently co-editor of the book series Climate & Cultures (Brill) and the Routledge Global Cooperation Series (Routledge). From 2007 to 2015, he acted as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen where he established the research area Climate and Cultures as a first of its kind in Germany, and founded the Center for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/ GCR21) in Duisburg. From 2008 to 2016, he was a member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). In 2021, he was named Honorary Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. Leggewie received several awards throughout his academic career, including the Volkmar and Margret Sander-Prize (New York University) in 2016. He regularly publishes in newspapers and magazines, including Le Monde diplomatique, The New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Rolling Stone.
Michael Lind is a senior editor at Commonplace and a fellow at New America. He has been an editor or writer at The New Republic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The National Interest and has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Texas. He is the author of The New Class War (2020) and Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America (2023).
Stephen Macedo is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics at Princeton University and the University Center for Human Values. He writes and teaches on political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism, democracy, and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, and family and sexuality. He is the author of Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage (Princeton University Press, 2015). In it, he defends same-sex marriage, marriage as a civil institution in law, and monogamy, from the standpoints of justice and the human good.
Mauro Magatti is Full Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of Milan. He has been Dean of the Faculty of Sociology and is the Director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Religion and Cultural Change (ARC) in the same University. He has been Visiting Professor at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, at the Kellogg Institute at the Notre Dame University and at Centre des Etudes Européennes at Sciences Po. His main scientific interests are focussed on the relationship between economy and society, the role of civic society and globalization in its cultural and social implications. Over the years, he has devoted himself to the topic of social generativity. He has been editor of Studi di Sociologia and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Political Anthropology. Among his last publications: Generare libertà. Accrescere la vita senza distruggere il mondo (Il mulino, 2024) with Chiara Giaccardi, and “The Entropic Effect of Globalization and the Sustainability Challenge. Towards a Bifurcation in Glocalism,” Journal of culture, politics, innovation, n.2 2023, with C. Giaccardi.
Chandra Mallampalli is a fellow of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College. He is the author of four historical monographs and many articles, which examine the intersection of religion, law, and society in colonial South India. Before moving to Boston, he taught for 22 years at Westmont College, where he held the Fletcher Jones Foundation Chair of the Social Sciences. His first three books examine the evolution of Christian, Muslim and Hindu identities in relation to legal and political policies and print media. His most recent book with Oxford University Press (New York), South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim, describes how the lives of Christians have been shaped by centuries of interactions with Hindus and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. His next project, “The Virtues of Mixture: Religion, Labor Migrants and Cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean” examines the experiences of cultural and racial mixture among South Indian labor migrants to West and Southeast Asia, and whether their religious commitments either facilitated or impeded their capacity for world citizenship.
John Milbank is Emeritus Professor of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Previously he taught at the Universities of Lancaster, Cambridge and Virginia. He is the author of many books, including Theology and Social Theory, and (with Adrian Pabst) The Politics of Virtue.
Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard. Naresh’s research interests span democratic theory, political violence, realism, and constitutionalism in 19th and 20th century South Asian, Afro-modern, and European political thought. His current book project, Democracy’s Violence, offers a new interpretation of Alexis de Tocqueville, W. E. B. Du Bois, B. R. Ambedkar, and Hannah Arendt’s writings on majorities, identities, and collective violence. Naresh’s publications include Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism: India, Pakistan, and Turkey (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018). Before completing his PhD in Political Science at Yale in 2022, he studied History at Delhi University and Political Science at Columbia University, and worked as a graduate researcher at the Center for Democracy, Toleration, and Religion in New York City.
Elias Opongo, SJ is the Dean of Hekima Institute of Peace Studies and International Relations (HIPSIR) at Hekima University College. He is a Jesuit priest, a peace practitioner and conflict analyst, and holds PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Bradford, UK, and MA in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame, USA. His research focus is in the areas of transitional justice and post-conflict reconstruction, ethics of just war, state fragility and militarization of conflicts, religious extremism and violence, state building and community peacebuilding, and extractive industries, conflict and natural resource governance. He runs professional training in conflict resolution, mediation, and peacebuilding. He has carried out many research projects in areas of proliferation of small arms, state fragility and conflict in Africa; extractive industries’ implications on policy, livelihoods and conflicts in Africa; post-conflict and liberal peace and implications on reconciliation, forgiveness, International Criminal Court, roles of NGOs, religious and cultural institutions, among others. Opongo has published books, book chapters and articles on conflict resolution, transitional justice, peacebuilding, and Catholic Social Teaching. His book titles include, among others: Religious Extremism and Violence in Africa (2019) and Elections, Violence and Transitional Justice in Africa (2022), co-authored with Timothy Murithi.
Adrian Pabst is one of two Deputy Directors at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). His research sits at the intersection of political theory, political economy, and public policy, with a particular focus on the interaction between political economy traditions, contemporary politics, and fiscal policy. He studied Economics at the University of Cambridge (1995–1998) before completing a Master’s at the London School of Economics. He later returned to Cambridge for his PhD in political thought and the philosophy of religion. He joined the University of Kent in 2009 as a lecturer, becoming a Professor in 2019, and previously held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Nottingham. His work in political thought explores liberalism and its critics, particularly Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and thinkers in conservative and socialist traditions. In political economy, he examines the moral philosophy behind Adam Smith’s market theory, the ‘civil economy’ tradition, and the role of civil society. His research has been published in leading journals, including International Review of Economics, Constitutional Political Economy, History of Political Economy, and The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. His co-authored book, The Politics of Virtue (2016), reflects these themes. In contemporary politics, Adrian studies the limits of liberal democracy and capitalism, post-liberal ideas (e.g., Catholic Social Teaching, guild socialism), and European federalism. His books include The Crisis of Global Capitalism (2011), Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015), and The Demons of Liberal Democracy (2019). He is currently co-writing The Constitution of Political Economy: Polity, Society and the Commonweal with Prof. Roberto Scazzieri, to be published by Cambridge University Press.
David Rasmussen is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and was Honorary President of the Center for Ethics and Global Politics of LUISS University. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Istanbul Seminars His fields of interest are contemporary continental philosophy, social and political philosophy. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Social Criticism. His books include: Reading Habermas; Universalism vs. Communitarianism in Ethics; Handbook of Critical Theory; Jürgen Habermas: The Foundations of the Habermas Project; Jürgen Habermas: Law and Politics; Jürgen Habermas: Ethics; Jürgen Habermas: Epistemology and Truth; Critical Theory Vol. I-IV.
Charles F. Sabel is a Professor of Law and Social Science at Columbia Law School. Previously, he was Ford International Professor of Social Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His undergraduate degree is in social studies, and his graduate degree is in government, both from Harvard University. His earlier work focused on the crisis of mass production and its implications for the regulation of markets and the macroeconomy. His more recent work develops pragmatist ideas into a general conception of democratic experimentalism, with particular attention to regulation, the provision of complex social services, and contracting under uncertainty. Sabel’s current projects include the elaboration of experimentalist or incremental solutions to apparently global problems such as trade and climate change; an investigation of the current transformation of U.S. administrative law in the face of uncertainty; and new models of economic development emerging with the spread of advanced techniques of “industrial” production to all sectors of the economy in the context of globalization.
Michael Sandel is a Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980. His work focuses on justice, ethics, democracy, and the moral implications of markets. He is the author of several widely translated books, including Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, and Democracy’s Discontent. His course Justice was the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and has been followed by tens of millions of viewers worldwide. He has also hosted the BBC series The Global Philosopher, engaging participants from around the world in discussions of ethical issues connected to global affairs. His public lectures and writings contribute to ongoing debates on civic life, inequality, and the role of moral reasoning in democratic societies.
Saskia Schäfer is the Head of Freigeist Research Project Secularity, Islam, and Democracy in Indonesia and Turkey. Her research focuses on politics and religion. She has held post-doctoral positions at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, both at Columbia University, and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her DPhil in political science from the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with the multidisciplinary Graduate School “Muslim Cultures and Societies.” Her book, Mobilizing Mainstream Islam: The Politics of Orthodoxy in Indonesia in Comparative Perspective, will be published by Cornell University Press in 2026.
Anina Schwarzenbach is a sociologist and Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, University of Bern. Her work lies at the intersection of sociology, criminology, and computational social sciences and focuses on social threats and governmental responses, social networks, media narratives, polarization, and state legitimacy. She has also worked extensively on issues related to institutional discrimination and policing of minorities. In her current project, in collaboration with the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Boston College, she analyzes the media discourse on violent extremism and its consequences on public opinion. Schwarzenbach is a former fellow with Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. She was a fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Cyber Project (2020-2022), a Belfer Center International Security Program postdoctoral fellow (2018-2020), as well as a member of the Belfer’s team that has built the National Cyber Power Index 2020. She also held positions as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Maryland, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and as a graduate researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Foreign Criminal Law and Criminology in Germany (2013-2018). For her research, she was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) postdoc mobility grant and a Fondazione Leonardo research grant. Schwarzenbach holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Freiburg, Germany, an LL.M. in criminology, and an M.A. in communication science and economics from the Swiss universities of Bern and Zurich.
Isaiah Sterrett is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Boston College and a Graduate Fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. His research focuses on the intersections of nationalism, state formation, and political culture in the modern era, with particular attention to the role of youth, education, and ideology in authoritarian regimes. Drawing on transnational and comparative approaches, his work examines how regimes cultivate loyalty and legitimacy through institutions of civic formation. At Boston College, he has taught courses on U.S. history, Atlantic history, and the cultural history of Boston, and has presented research on political identity, historical memory, and the dynamics of democracy under pressure. As a fellow at the Clough Center, he engages in interdisciplinary dialogue on the challenges facing constitutional democracy today, contributing to academic and civic conversations on democratic resilience, authoritarianism, and historical responsibility.
Ananya Vajpeyi is a scholar and writer and works at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory, and critical philology. She is the author of Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India published by Harvard University Press (2012), which won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize (2011), the Crossword Award (2013), and the Tata First Book Prize (2013). Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, and a Research Consultant with the Nilgiri Archaeological Project, University of Ghent, Belgium. Most recently, she has been a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University (Fall 2023) and a Visiting Fellow at CRASSH, University of Cambridge (2019-20). She has been involved with Reset DOC since 2012, was the scientific coordinator of the Venice Delhi Seminars 2016, and co-edited Minorities and Populism: Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe (Springer, 2020).
Camila Vergara is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile writing on the relation between inequality and the law, and the possible institutional solutions to systemic corruption. She is Editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, Associate Editor of Critical Sociology, and organiser of the Venice Multidisciplinary World Conference on Republics and Republicanism. She is the author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (Princeton University Press 2020), and her work on constitutional theory, republicanism, corruption, and populism has been featured in leading international journals such as the Journal of Political Philosophy, History of Political Thought, and REVUS: Journal for Constitutional Theory and Philosophy of Law. She is also a global public intellectual, with her articles and interviews featured in outlets such as New Left Review, Jacobin, Politico, Revista Plebeya, and Il Manifesto Inret, and an activist advising and collaborating with grassroots organisations on rights, deliberative democracy, and community-based forms of governance.