Mehdi Khalaji is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy specializing in Shiʿa politics and Iran’s religious establishment. 

Benedikt Roemer is a Walter Benjamin Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Oxford. His research interests include religious diversity in the Middle East, religion and nationalism, diaspora studies, the history and contemporary story of the Iranian Christian community and ethnographic research on religion in Arabic, Persian and […]

Wai Wai Nu, is a human rights advocate and former political prisoner from Myanmar who founded the Women’s Peace Network.

Candace Lukasik is Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. Her research explores religion and the transnational politics of violence, migration, race, and indigeneity in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Iraq, and its US diasporas.

The Center for the Study of African American Religious Life (CSAARL) is part of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Media inquiries, interview requests, and press passes for the center should be directed through the NMAAHC Office of Public Affairs.

Alaina Morgan is a history professor at the University of Southern California, where is focuses on the African Diaspora and the historic utility of religion, in particular Islam, in racial liberation and anti-colonial movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century Atlantic world.

Donna Auston is an anthropologist, writer, and public intellectual whose body of work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, protest and social movements, media representation and Islam in America. She is the Senior Program Officer at the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York.

Michael Muhammad Knight is a scholar, author and gonzo journalist whose work covers Islamic studies, American Islam, hadith literature, gender studies, race and theories of the body.

Irene Khan is the United Nations’ special rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression and an advocate for human rights who formerly led Amnesty International. Contact is through the U.N. Office for the High Commissioner on Human Rights.