Collaborative WorkKeynote Panelists
R. Kent Greenawalt
Columbia University
LL.B., Columbia University
B. Phil., Oxford
B.A., Swarthmore
Selected Publications
Private Consciences and Public Reasons (1995)
Fighting Words (1995)
Law and Objectivity (1992)
Speech, Crime, and the Uses of Language (1989)
Religious Convictions and Political Choice (1988)
Biography and Research Interests
Kent Greenawalt is University Professor at Columbia University. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1965, was law clerk to Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan and subsequently spent part of a summer as an attorney with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Jackson, Mississippi. From 1966 to 1969, served on the Civil Rights Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Member of the Due Process Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, 1969-71. Deputy U.S. Solicitor General, 1971-72. Fellow of American Council of Learned Societies. Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Member, American Philosophical Society. President, American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, 1991-93. He has published widely in the field of constitutional law; representative publications include Religious Convictions and Political Choice (1988); Speech, Crime, and the Uses of Language (1989); Law and Objectivity (1992); Fighting Words (1995); and Private Consciences and Public Reasons (1995).
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
University of Buffalo School of Law
Ph.D., J.D., University of Chicago
Recent Publications
Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005)
Biography and Research Interests
Winnifred Fallers Sulivan is the incoming director of the Law and Religion Program at the University of Buffalo School of Law and in 2006-07 was the Lilly Endowment Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Trained as a jurist and a religious scholar, Sullivan has served as an expert witness in several trials where religious freedoms have been in question. She has written extensively on religion and its place in American culture and jurisprudence, not only as a right, but also as a regulated practice and a tool for implementing policy. Her most recent book, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005), was lauded by peers as a provocative and engaging contribution to the study of religion and Constitutional law that makes a powerful and convincing argument countering popular beliefs about religious freedom in America.
James Tully
University of Victoria
Ph.D., University of Cambridge
B.A., University of British Columbia
Biography and Recent Interests
James Hamilton Tully is the Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Law, Indigenous Governance and Philosophy at the University of Victoria. After completing his B.A. at UBC and Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, he taught in the departments of Philosophy and Political Science at McGill University 1977-1996. He was Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria 1996-2001. In 2001-2003 he was the inaugural Henry N.R. Jackman Distinguished Professor in Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto in the departments of Philosophy and Political Science and the Faculty of Law. In 2003 he returned to the University of Victoria. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation. He is the author or editor of eight books and many articles in the field of contemporary political and legal philosophy (or theory) and its history, and in Canadian political and legal philosophy.
Conference Participants
Anver Emon
University of Toronto School of Law
Ph.D., History, UCLA
LL.M., Yale Law School
M.A., History, University of Texas at Austin
J.D., UCLA School of Law
B.A., UC Berkeley
Biography and Research Interests
Anver M. Emon is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, teaching Islamic law and torts. He is also cross appointed (status only) to the Centre for the Study of Religion. Anvers research specialization is in medieval and modern Islamic legal theory and history. His general academic interests include law and religion, legal history (medieval European and Islamic), and legal philosophy. His current research interests focus on the Islamic legal philosophical traditions and the treatment of non-Muslims under Islamic law. He is called to the California State Bar. He has published articles on topics such as Islamic constitutionalism, Islam and democracy, and more recently on natural law and natural rights in Islamic law. Currently he sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Law and Religion.
Rosemary Hicks
Columbia University
Doctoral Candidate, Columbia University
M. Phil, Columbia University
Certificate in Womens Studies, Institute for Research on Women and
Gender, Columbia University
M.A., Graduate Theological Union
B.A., Bethany College
Biography and Research Interests
Rosemary R. Hicks is a doctoral candidate in the Columbia University Religion Department focusing on Islam in the United States and intellectual histories of pluralism. She is a 2007-2008 American Fellow under the American Association of University Women, and holds a Mellon fellowship with the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia. She is writing an ethno-history investigating how Muslims in New York engage in inter-religious endeavors while identifying as religious and political moderates. Rosemary is interested in how various groups have responded to increased religious and ethnic diversity by forming alliances around particular issues and/or appealing to neo-liberalism in the midst of disagreements over secularism, multiculturalism, and issues of gender and sexuality. She has organized two graduate student conferences examining theoretical and methodological issues in religious studies and has published in American Quarterly (2007), Comparative Islamic Studies (2007) and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (2004). She has lectured in women's studies and American religious history courses, taught "Islam in the United States," and spent the summer of 2007 in Lebanon under a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.
Janet Jakobsen
Barnard College
Ph.D., Religion (Ethics and Society), Emory University
Biography and Research Interests
Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity
and Feminist Ethics
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious
Tolearnce (with Ann Pellegrini)
Biography and Research Interests
Janet R. Jakobsen is Director of the Center for Research on Women. She received her Ph.D. in Ethics and Society from the Graduate Division of Religion of Emory University. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics and Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolearnce (with Ann Pellegrini). Most recently, she is editor of Secularisms (with Ann Pellegrini). She is also the editor of "The Scholar and Feminist Online" (www.barnard.edu/sfonline), the webjournal of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Professor Jakobsen is Principal Investigator for the Barnard College "Difficult Dialogues" project, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. She has been a fellow at the Udall Center for Public Policy, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst, lobbyist, and organizer in Washington, D.C.
Tracy Leavelle
Creighton University
Ph.D., History, Arizona State University
B.A., Dartmouth College
Biography and Research Interests:
Tracy Neal Leavelle is Assistant Professor of History and Native American Studies and co-director of the American Studies Program at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He joined the faculty at Creighton in 2003 after two years at Smith College as the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. There, he taught in the American Studies Program and participated in the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute project on "Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Ancient and Modern Worlds." His book manuscript, "Encounters of Spirit: Religion, Culture, and Community in French and Indian North America," examines the nature of spiritual encounters between Catholic missionaries and American Indians in colonial North America, exploring such issues as the translation and reception of religious concepts, the impact of gender and generational differences on Native responses to Christianity, and the role of religion in shaping colonial geographies. He has published in American Quarterly, Church History, American Indian Quarterly, and The Journal of Religion & Society, has created an interactive mission atlas as part of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, and has edited a series of documents on indigenous Christianity for the on-line collection Women and Social Movements in the United States.
Peggy Levitt
Wellesley College and Harvard University
Ph.D., Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M.A., Public Health, Columbia University
M.S., Urban Planning, Columbia University
B.A., Sociology, Brandeis University
Recent Publications
God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American
Religious Landscape (2007)
The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second
Generation (edited with Mary Waters) (2002)
The Transnational Villagers (2001)
Biography and Research Interests:
Peggy Levitt is associate Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Wellesley College and a Research Fellow at The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and at The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. Her new book, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape will be published by The New Press in Spring 2007. She is co-director of the Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard University, co-director of the SSRC working group on religion and globalization, and co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation project on how global ideas about women's rights are translated in local contexts. She is also co-principal investigator on a Metanexus Foundation study of spiritual capital and immigrant incorporation. Her book, The Transnational Villagers, was published by the University of California Press in 2001. The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (edited with Mary Waters) was published by Russell Sage in 2002. She also edited (with Josh Dewind and Steven Vertovec) a special volume of International Migration Review on transnational migration in Fall 2003.
Michael McNally
Carleton College
Ph.D., A.M., M.Div., Harvard University
B.A., Carleton College
Recent Publications
Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion (Oxford University Press)
Biography and Research Interests
Michael McNally is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Carleton College. He is the author of Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion (Oxford University Press), editor of an unpublished 1950's ethnography of Michigan's Anishinaabe community [2003], and a forthcoming volume on eldership, religion, and Ojibwe tradition funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon "New Directions" Fellowship which he has used to further develop his interests in Native cultures and American legal traditions.
Geneviève Zubrzycki
University of Michigan
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Recent Publications
The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
Biography and Research Interests
Geneviève Zubrzycki is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Virginia's Center on Religion and Democracy. Her research focuses on the linkages between religion, politics, and collective memory at moments of significant political transformation. Her book The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (University of Chicago Press, 2006) examines the historical constitution of the relationship between Polish national identity and Catholicism and its reconfiguration after the fall of communism. It received the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Religion section in 2007. Zubrzycki's next project is a historical ethnography of the triadic relationship between religion, nationalism, and state (re)formation in Poland and Quebec, through the examination of the "careers" of religious symbols and their ritual use in religious processions, political demonstrations, and popular parades.
Workshop Discussant
Benjamin Berger
Faculty of Law, University of Victoria
Candidate Doctor of Laws (J.S.D.), Yale University
Master of Laws (L.L.M.), Yale University
Bachelor of Laws (L.L.B.), University of Victoria
Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours), Religious Studies, University
of Alberta
Recent Publications
"Law's Religion: Rendering Culture" (Forthcoming) 45:2 Osgoode
Hall Law Journal.
"On the Book of Job, Justice, and the Precariousness of the Criminal
Law" (Forthcoming) Law, Culture and the Humanities.
"Emotions and the Veil of Voluntarism: The Loss of Judgment in Canadian
Crimianl Law" (2006) 51 McGill Law Journal 99-128.
"Our Evolving Judicature: Security Certificates, Detention Review,
and the Federal Courts" (2006) 39:1 U.B.C. Law Review 101-137.
"Understanding Law and Religion as Culture: Making Room for Meaning
in the Public Sphere." (2006) 15:1 Constitutional Forum 15-22.
Biography and Research Interests:
Benjamin Berger is a young scholar of Canadian constitutionalism who holds an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from a Canadian University, and has graduate training in law from Yale University. Prior to joining the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria, Professor Berger served as Law Clerk to the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada's Supreme Court. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University in 2003-2004. His research addresses questions related to constitutional and criminal law and theory, the law of evidence, law and culture, and law and religion. Professor Berger teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, and Civil Liberties and the Charter.