Lisa Anderson is Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor Emerita of International Relations at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. She served as President of the American University in Cairo for five years, from 2011-2016. Prior to her appointment as President, she was the University’s provost, a position she had assumed in 2008. She is Dean Emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she led the school from 1997-2007. She was on the faculty of Columbia since 1986; prior to her appointment as Dean, she served as Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute; she held the Shotwell Chair in the Department of Political Science. She has also taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and in the Government and Social Studies departments at Harvard University. Her research has included work on state formation in the Middle East and North Africa; on regime change and democratization in developing countries; and on social science, academic research and public policy both in the United States and around the world.
Arjun Appadurai is a prominent contemporary social-cultural anthropologist, having formerly served as Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School in New York City. He has held various professorial chairs and visiting appointments at some of top institutions in the United States and Europe. In addition, he has served on several scholarly and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe and India. He is a world renowned expert on the cultural dynamics of globalization, having authored numerous books and scholarly articles. The nature and significance of his contributions throughout his academic career have earned him the reputation as a leading figure in his field.His latest book (co-authored with Neta Alexander) is Failure (Polity, 2019). He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Paolo Boccardelli has been Rector of Luiss Guido Carli University since 2024; he has been a Full Professor of Economics, Business Management and Business Strategy at Luiss University since 2011 (having been an Associate Professor since 2004). He is Director of the Franco Fontana Research Centre for Strategic Change at the same university and Co-Director of the Board Academy Programme at Luiss Business School. He served as Director of Luiss Business School from 2015 to May 2022 and as Dean for International Development at the school from 2011 to 2015. In June 2024, he received the Luiss Engaged Research Award. His main areas of research include business strategy, the resources and dynamic capabilities view, and the institution-based view.
Giancarlo Bosetti is the Vice Chair, previously Executive Chair, and one of the founders of Reset DOC and Reset, a cultural magazine he founded in 1993. He was vice-editor-in-chief of the Italian daily L’Unità. He is the editor-in-chief of the web-magazine of Resetdoc.org. He is currently contributing to the Italian daily La Repubblica and he has been teaching sociology of communication at University La Sapienza and University Roma Tre. He published La lezione di questo secolo, a book-interview with Karl Popper; Cattiva maestra televisione (ed.), writings by Karl Popper and others. Among his other 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).
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 is Degenerations of Democracy, co-authored with Charles Taylor and Dilip Gaonkar. 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 (LSE), president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 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.
Michael Driessen, who has been teaching at John Cabot University since 2012, is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and the inaugural Director of the MA program in International Affairs at John Cabot University. Michael received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame and has been a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar, as well as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He has taught at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna and holds a research affiliation with Cambridge University’s Von Hügel Institute. He also serves as an advisor for the Adyan Foundation in Lebanon. His research focuses on the role of public religions in Catholic and Muslim societies, and he teaches courses on Religion and Global Politics, the politics of the Middle East and Mediterranean, and War, Peace, and Conflict Resolution.
Pasquale Ferrara, who served as Political Director of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation from 2021 to 2025, is the Executive Chair of Reset DOC. He served as Italy’s Special Envoy for Libya and held long-term postings in Santiago de Chile, Athens, the European Union, and Washington. From 2016 to 2020, he was Italy’s Ambassador to Algiers. Between 2011 and 2016, Ferrara served as Secretary General of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He currently teaches Diplomacy and Negotiation at LUISS Guido Carli and Active and Preventive Policies for Peace at the Sophia University Institute in Loppiano, Italy. His most recent book is Cercando un paese innocente. La pace possibile in un mondo in frantumi (“Searching for an Innocent Country. Possible Peace in a Shattered World”, 2023).
Adam Habib is an academic, researcher, activist, administrator, and well-known public intellectual. Prior to his appointment as Director of SOAS, he was Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa from 2013. He joined the University of Johannesburg as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research, Innovation, Advancement and Library in 2007. He is one of the co-founders of the African Research Universities Alliance, an affiliation of research-intensive universities on the continent. His research areas are the democratisation and its consolidation in South Africa, contemporary social movements, philanthropy, inequality, giving and its impact on poverty alleviation and development, institutional reform, changing identities and their evolution in the post-apartheid era, and South Africa’s role in Africa and beyond.
Silja Häusermann is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich, where she teaches classes on Swiss politics, comparative political economy, comparative politics and welfare state research. Her research interests are in comparative politics, comparative political economy and behavior. More specifically, she studies socio-structural change, electoral and party system change, and their impact on distributive policies, as well as inequality, the transformation of welfare state and labor market politics in advanced post-industrial democracies. She is Deputy Director of the UZH Research Priority Program Equality of Opportunities (co-directed with David Dorn and Matthias Mahlmann).
Chris Higgins coordinates the program in Transformative Educational Studies and co-directs the Formative Leadership Education Project. A philosopher of education, Higgins seeks to articulate the existential dimensions of teaching and learning, defend the idea of education as a public good, and recall education to its humane roots. He has written on: the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship; action research and the philosophy of inquiry; ignorance and open-mindedness; humanism and liberal learning; imagination and aesthetic education; practice and vocational formation, and the experimental tradition in higher education. His book, The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) offers one of the first systematic extensions of virtue ethics to questions concerning work and professional identity. His current book project, entitled Humane Learning: Formative Essays on Educational Integrity, is an inquiry into the problems and possibilities of formative higher education.
Seth N. Jaffe is Associate Professor (Research) of the History of Political Thought at LUISS. His PhD is from the University of Toronto, his Master of Science from the LSE, and his Bachelor of Art from Bowdoin. He has worked on U.S. foreign policy, been a postdoc at the FU Berlin, and is a regular Senior Associate of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He has research interests in Greek and Roman political philosophy, the history of international political thought, and how classical frameworks can enrich contemporary debates. His first book, Thucydides on the Outbreak of War, was published in 2017, and he is working on a book on Polybius. He recently co-edited (with Guillermo Graíño Ferrer) a double special issue of The Review of Politics on populism in the history of political thought.
Marlene Laruelle is Director and Research Professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University. She is also a Co-Director of PONARS (Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia) and Director of George Washington’s Central Asia Program. Her research explores the transformations of nationalist and conservative ideologies in Russia and nationhood construction in Central Asia, as well as the development of Russia’s Arctic regions. Two of her books will be out in late 2020: Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West (Cornell University Press) and Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War. Red versus Whites (Bloomsbury).
Jonathan Laurence is Professor of Political Science at Boston College and Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. A specialist in comparative politics, Laurence has conducted fieldwork in more than a dozen countries, held fellowships in France, Germany, and Italy, and served as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. His scholarship focuses on politics and religion in Western Europe, Turkey, and North Africa. He is the co-author of Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France (2006) and the author of The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration (2012). His latest work is Coping with Defeat: Islam, Catholicism, and the Modern State (2021). In 2022, the American Political Science Association named Coping with Defeat the “Best Book in Religion and Politics”, which was his fourth APSA award.
Marc Lazar is a Professor of Political History and Sociology, the director of the Center for History at Sciences Po (Paris) and the President of the Advisory Board of this University. He is also the President of the School of Government at Luiss University. His research focuses on the left and far left in Europe, politics in Italy, politics in France, comparative politics in France, Italy and European Union, populism, violence in politics, relations between history and political science. He published 26 books and more than 200 articles in French, Italian, English, German, Romanian in academic journals. Marc Lazar is columnist for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and very present in Italian, French and international medias.
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, and joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. He retired from full-time work in the Department in May 2024 but remains active in research and doctoral education. He is currently Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol and affiliated also to Tsinghua University in China and the University of Melbourne in Australia. He led the ESRC Centre for Global Higher Education between November 2015 and May 2024. His research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, higher education in East Asia, global science, and the social contributions of higher education. He is currently preparing an integrated theorisation of higher education.
Christopher Newfield is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the immediate past President of the Modern Language Association. Newfield began his career as an Assistant Professor of English at Rice University, before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara where he worked for over thirty years.
Giovanni Orsina is the Director of the Political Science Departmenet at Luiss Guido Carli University and Professor of Contemporary History at Luiss Guido Carli University, Rome. At the School, he is the Co-director of the Policy Observatory. He is the Director of the Master in European Studies, which he founded ten years ago. At Luiss, he is also the Director of the International centre on democracies and democratisations (Icedd). He taught at the Universities of Bologna, L’Aquila, and Roma La Sapienza. He is a founding member and the vice-president of the Association for Political History. He was for more than a decade the Director of Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Rome. He is the author of five monographs and about fifty essays and the editor of thirteen volumes or journal special issues on Twentieth-century European politics, published in Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish.
Shalini Randeria is a social anthropologist and a sociologist. She was Rector and President of Central European University from 2021 to 2025, Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna (2015-2021), and Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva (2012-2021), where she was also the founding Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. She holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a research group on “soft authoritaritanisms” and currently she is deputy Chair of the Class of Social and Related Sciences, Academia Europaea. She published widely on the anthropology of globalization, law, the state and social movements. Her research on soft authoritarianism, democracy and demography, forced displacement and dispossession, and the politics of (un)accountability has been carried out in collaboration with historians, political scientists and legal scholars. She is the author of the podcast series, Democracy in Question, in its eleventh season.