Co-Directors
Advisory Board
Staff
Affiliated Faculty
Directors
Emily Mackil (UC Berkeley Department of History and Chair, Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archeology) is a historian of the ancient Greek world who has written extensively about the development and nature of Greek federal states; the entanglement of religious practice and political power; the economic history of the Greek world; and most recently about property ownership.
Post-Doctoral Scholars
Research Associate
Steven Barrie-Anthony (PhD, PsyD) is a 2021–2024 BCSR Research Associate.
Barrie-Anthony is a scholar of religion and a research psychoanalyst with a clinical practice in the Bay Area. He holds doctorates in Religious Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara), and in Psychoanalysis (Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis). Barrie-Anthony’s research approach brings together contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice with religion scholarship. He is particularly interested in exploring emerging social and civic groups among the religiously non-affiliated and the “spiritual but not religious.”
Barrie-Anthony is the founding Director of Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a multidisciplinary research initiative examining the impacts of technologies on human relationships. The initiative is based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Barrie-Anthony’s work examines the way technologies are shifting how humans relate to each other—what it means to be human and to be present with others—and how religion is ideally suited to help us understand and navigate these shifts.
Visiting Scholars
Udi Greenberg studies and teaches modern European history, intellectual history, and international history. His scholarship and teaching focus especially on the intersection of ideas, institution building, and Europe’s interactions with the world. His work has been supported, among others, by the ACLS, Mellon Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the DAAD.
His first book, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2015), traces the intellectual, institutional, and political journey of five influential political theorists from their education in Weimar Germany to their participation in the formation of the Cold War. It argues that both Germany’s postwar democratization, and the German-American alliance, were deeply shaped by these émigrés’ attempts to revive intellectual, religious, and political projects first developed in Weimar Germany. In 2016, it was awarded the Council of European Studies’ Book Prize (for best first book in European studies 2014-2015). It also appeared in German, Korean, and Hebrew translations.
He is currently working on a second book-length project, tentatively titled Religious Pluralism in the Age of Violence: Catholics and Protestants from Animosity to Peace 1885-1965. This project explores the intersections between twentieth-century religious thought and global politics. It investigates how transformations in global politics–the rise of Nazism, the unfolding of the Cold War, and the the process of European decolonization in Asia and Africa–helped fascilitate the end of the prolonged religious animosities between Protestants and Catholics.
His articles (mostly related to these two book projects) have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Historical Review, Journal of Modern History, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Journal of Contemproary History, among others. He has also published several essays on politics, religion, and history in The Nation, Dissent, Boston Review, L.A. Review of Books, n+1 and elsewhere.
At Dartmouth, he teaches a wide variety of classes on modern European and international history. In 2016, he was elected by the senior class as Dartmouth’s best professor, and was awarded the Jerome Goldstein Award, Dartmouth’s top teaching prize.
Andrea Vestrucci (Ph.D., University of Milan; Ph.D., University of Lille) has served as Professor at the Federal University in Fortaleza, Brazil; Australia Award fellow of Monash University; and researcher of the University of Milan. Currently a member of the Eric Weil Institute in Lille, he has recently completed a major research project in systematic theology for the University of Geneva.
His scientific commitment embraces both philosophical and theological speculations.
Concerning philosophy, he is a scholar of Kant and Neo-Kantianism (H. Cohen, E. Weil), and of the Hungarian Kreis called “Budapest School” (G. Lukács, A. Heller, F. Fehér, G. Markus). His philosophical research focuses on transcendental logic, meta-ethics, the ethics-aesthetics relationship, and philosophy of right.
Concerning theology, he deepened Martin Luther’s concept of freedom and its contemporary interpreters (and critics). His theological research focuses on the issue of theological language, the relationship between human meaning and divine revelation, and the rapport (and difference) between theology and philosophy.
I took a degree in Law (1999) and in History (2003) and I completed my PhD in Early Modern History (2006) at the University of Trieste. I have held fellowships from Alpen-Adria Universität (Klagenfurt 2006), Karl-Franzens Universität (Graz 2007), Max Planck Institute for Legal History (Frankfurt am Main 2013) and I have been visiting Scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris 2016). Since 2008 (2011 full-time) I am researcher at the Bruno Kessler Foundation, Italian German Historical Institute. As adjunct professor, I teach a course in in History of Historiography at the University of Trent (2014 Atlantic History, 2015 Food History).
My broad areas of research are religious history in the early modern age, Jesuit studies and food history.
My current research explores the historical concept of Patchwork Religion as a spiritual experience characterized by the coexistence of elements from different traditions, religions, exoteric and spiritual movements. In this field of research, I am especially interested in history of food and food habits (ecclesiastical fast, table behaviors, beverages and drunkenness) as essential features of the negotiation between individuals and cultural models.
Graduate Students
BCSR rewards promising young scholars from diverse disciplines with New Directions in Theology grants and faculty mentorship to create and shape a long-term community of inquiry on religion on the Berkeley campus. These graduate students explore new directions for the study of religion through biweekly meetings convened by BCSR faculty. To see a list of past grantees, please click here.
The Designated Emphasis in the Study of Religion (DESR) supports graduate training in Religious Studies and in the Theory of the Study of Religion, promotes graduate research on topics related to religion, and brings together a cross-disciplinary faculty Group in the Study of Religion. To see a list of DESR students, please click here.