Johann Arnason, La Trobe University (Victoria,
   Australia)
Jan Assmann, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
   (Heidelberg, Germany)
Robert N. Bellah, University of California (Berkeley,
   USA)
José Casanova, Georgetown University (Washington
   D.C., USA)
Merlin Donald, Queen's University (Kingston, Canada)
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Hebrew University (Jerusalem,
   Israel)
Jürgen Habermas, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Univer-
   sität (Frankfurt a.M., Germany)
Hans Joas, University of Erfurt: Max Weber Center for
   Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Erfurt, Germany)
Matthias Jung, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der
   Wissenschaften (Berlin, Germany)
Richard Madsen, University of California (San Diego,
   USA)
Manos Marangudakis, University of the Aegean
   (Mytilene, Greece)
David Martin, London School of Economics and Political
   Science (London, UK)
Mohammad Nafissi , London Metropolitan University
   (London, UK)
Gananath Obeyesekere, Princeton University
   (Princeton, USA)
Heiner Roetz, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Bochum,
   Germany)
W. Garry Runciman, Trinity College (Cambridge, UK)
William M. Sullivan, The Carnegie Foundation for the
   Advancement of Teaching (Stanford, USA)
Ann Swidler, University of California (Berkeley, USA)
Charles Taylor, McGill University (Montreal, Canada)
Steven M. Tipton, Emory University (Atlanta, USA)
Björn Wittrock, Swedish Collegium for Advanced
   Study (Uppsala, Sweden)




Short CV

Johann Arnason, La Trobe University (Victoria, Australia)

Jan Assmann, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Ägyptologisches Institut Heidelberg

Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. He was educated at Harvard University, receiving the B.A. in 1950 and the Ph.D. in 1955. He began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left there as Professor of Sociology in 1967 when he moved to Berkeley to become Ford Professor of Sociology. His publications include Tokugawa Religion, Beyond Belief, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation, and most recently (2006) The Robert Bellah Reader. In 1985 he published Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, in collaboration with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton, and in 1991, with the same collaborators, The Good Society. In 2000 Bellah was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
Homepage by Robert N. Bellah

José Casanova joined Georgetown University as Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow in the Center in January 2008. Casanova, a leading authority on religion and world affairs, has published widely on sociological theory, migration, and globalization. His critically acclaimed Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994) has been published in five languages. Casanova studied Philosophy in Saragossa, Spain, received an M.A. in Theology from the University of Innsbruck, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research. Casanova moved to Georgetown from the New School, where he served as Professor of Sociology from 1987-2007.
Link to José Casanova

Merlin Donald was born in Montreal, Canada, and holds a PhD in Neuropsychology from McGill University. In 1972, he joined the faculty at Queen's University, in Ontario, and became Chair of the Department of Psychology in 2002. In 2005, he became Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Cognitive Science, at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. He was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association in 1984, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1995, and a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Science in 2006. He is now Professor Emeritus at Queen's University and Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. Selected publications: (1) Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition (Harvard, 1991); (2) A mind so rare: The evolution of human consciousness (Norton, 2001); (3) Consciousness and governance: From embodiment to enculturation - An interview. In L. Andreassen, L. Brandt, & J. Vang, (Eds) Cognitive Semiotics. 2007, 68-83; (4) Art and cognitive evolution. In M. Turner, (Ed) The artful mind: Cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity. Oxford University Press, 2006, 1:3-20; (5) Hominid enculturation and cognitive evolution. In C. Renfrew, P. Mellars, & C. Scarre, (Eds) Cognition and material culture: The archaeology of symbolic storage. Cambridge, U.K., The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998, 7-17; (6) Material culture and cognition: Concluding thoughts. In C. Renfrew & C. Scarre (Eds) Cognition and material culture: The archaeology of external symbolic storage. Cambridge, U.K., The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998, 181-187.
Link to Merlin Donald

Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt was born in 1923 in Warsaw, Poland. He is the Rose Isaacs Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has been a faculty member since 1946. He has served as visiting professor at numerous universities and was Fellow at the Center of Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, and in the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt. He is a member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foreign Member, American Philosophical Society, Foreign Associate, National Academy of Sciences (USA), Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics, Honorary Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Professor Eisenstadt is a recipient of many honorary doctoral degrees: in the Harvard University, University of Helsinki, Tel Aviv University, Duke University, Central European University, Budapest; Hebrew Union College, University of Warsaw; Haifa University; and has won many awards, among them the McIver Award of the American Sociological Association, the International Balzan Prize in Sociology, , the Israel Prize and the Rothschild Prize in Social Sciences, Max Planck Research and Humboldt Awards, and Amalphi Prize in European Sociology; Ambassador of Cultural Dialogue Award, Polish Asia Pacific Council, Warsaw; EMET Foundation Prize in Sociology, The Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is an author of numerous books and articles in scholarly journals. Last Publications: (1) Paradoxes of Democracy: Fragility, Continuity and Change. Baltimore: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington and The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999. (translated also into Italian, Arabic, Hebrew and German); (2) Die Vielfalt der Moderne. Velbruck Wissenschaft, 2000; (3) Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolutions. Cambridge University Press, 2000; (4) (Ed.with Wolfgang Schluchter and Bjorn Wittrock (eds.) , Public Spheres and Collective Identities. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001; (5) Ed. Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick(U.S.A.) and London(U.K.): Transaction Publishers, 2002; (6) Comparative Civilizations & Multiple Modernities - 2 volumes collection of essays. Brill Leiden-Boston, 2003; (7) Modernity and Modernization: Collection of Essays. (in Italian), Rubettino, Italy, 2004; (8) Modernity and Modernization. (in Chinese), SDX Joint Publishing Company, China, 2004; (9) Explorations in Jewish Historical Experience: The Civilizational Dimension. Brill: Leiden/Boston.2004; (10) Political Theory in the Search of the Political. Name edizioni: Genova. (Italian). 2004; (11) Múltiplas Modernidades: Ensaios" (in Portuguese), Livros Horizonte: Lisboa. 2007.
Some information in German

Hans Joas, born 1948 in Munich (Germany), is the Max Weber Professor at the University of Erfurt and director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies there. He is also professor of sociology and member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is a regular member of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin and has recently become a permanent non-resident fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences. He held visiting professorships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, New School for Social Research, New York, Duke University, University of Vienna etc. He is Vice-President of the International Sociological Association. Selected publications: The Genesis of Values (University of Chicago Press/Polity Press) 2000; War and Modernity (Blackwell) 2003; Social Theory (published in German by Suhrkamp 2004, forthcoming in English: Cambridge University Press); Do We Need Religion? On Experiences of Self-Transcendence (Paradigm) 2008.
Link to Hans Joas

Jürgen Habermas

Matthias Jung, currently fellow at Bochum University in the international program "Dynamics in the History of Religions". Main areas of research: philosophy of religion, anthropology and cognitive sciences, hermeneutics and pragmatism.
Link to Matthias Jung

Richard Madsen is distinguished professor and chair of the sociology department at the University of California, San Diego and a co-author (with Robert Bellah et al.) of the The Good Society and Habits of the Heart which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was jury nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has authored or co-authored five books on China, including Morality and Power in a Chinese Village for which he received the C. Wright Mills Award; China's Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society; and China and the American Dream. He also co-edited (with Tracy B. Strong) The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World. His latest book is Democracy's Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan.
Link to Richard Madsen

Manos Marangudakis is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of the Aegean in Greece. Previously he has held posts at the University of Ulster and Queen's University at Belfast. He was educated at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki (BA in Economics) and McGill University in Montreal (MA and PhD in Sociology). His primary focus of research has been an historical analysis of the relationship between nature and political power in the West and other Axial civilization centers. He has edited and translated a series of Historical and Comparative Sociology seminal works in Greek in an effort to advance the study of the subjects in his home country. Currently he is writting a book on American fundamentalism and its effects on biotechnological research in the US
Link to Manos Marangudakis

David Martin, London School of Economics and Political Science
Link to David Martin

Mohammad Nafissi is Senior Lecturer in Political Economy and the Associate Director of the newly established Centre for the Study of Religion, Conflict and Cooperation at London Metropolitan University. He has taught at universities in Iran, the US, Turkey and Britain. His principal research and teaching interests are in the fields of comparative religion, development and politics, ancient and modern. Dr Nafissi's recent publications include, 'Before and Beyond the Clash of Civilisations', ISIM Review 19 (2007); 'Reformation as a General Ideal Type', Max Weber Studies, 6, 1 (2006); 'Islam, Reformation and Democracy: Evolutionary and Antievolutionary Reform in Abrahamic Religions', Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East, 25, 2; Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology: Value, Theory and Evidence in Historical Sciences, London; and 'Class, Embeddedness, and the Modernity of Ancient Athens' Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46, 2 (2004).
Link to Mohammad Nafissi

Gananath Obeyesekere
Link to Gananath Obeyesekere

Heiner Roetz
Link to Heiner Roetz

W. G. (Garry) Runciman, born 1934. Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge since 1971. Fellow, British Academy since 1974 (President 2001-05). Honorary Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford. Foreign Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Honorary Doctorates: Edinburgh, London, Oxford, York. Principal publications: Plato's Later Epistemology (1959); Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (1966); A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science (1972); A Treatise on Social Theory (vol I, 1983; vol II, 1989; vol III, 1997); The Social Animal (1998). A book provisionally titled An Introduction to the Theory of Cultural and Social Selection is scheduled for publication in 2009.
Link to W. G. (Garry) Runciman

William M. Sullivan is Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and co-director of the Foundation's Preparation for the Professions Program. This is a series of comparative studies of education in the United States for the professions of law, medicine, nursing, the clergy, and engineering. Trained in philosophy, Sullivan has also recently participated in studies of education in the humanities and social sciences, emphasizing the relations between theoretic knowledge and practical reason. Sullivan is co-editor of The Globalization of Ethics: Religious and Secular Perspectives. His most recent book is A New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice. He is also co-author of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society.
Link to William M. Sullivan

Ann Swidler
Link to Ann Swidler

Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University, Montréal. Author of Sources of the Self and A Secular Age.
Link to Charles Taylor

Steven M. Tipton teaches sociology and religion at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology. He completed a joint PhD degree in these fields from Harvard University in 1979. He is the author of Public Pulpits (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and a co-author of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society.
Emory University

Björn Wittrock
Link to Björn Wittrock