CEDAR - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Director
• President
• Professor of Religion at Boston University

Seligman is a professor of religion at Boston University and a research associate at the university's Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. He has taught at universities in the United States, Israel, and Hungary, where he was a Fulbright Fellow from 1990 to 1992. He lived for close to 20 years in Israel, where he was a member of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in the early 1970s. His books include The Idea of Civil Society; Inner-Worldly Individualism; The Problem of Trust; Modernity's Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence; Market and Community: The Bases of Social Order, Revolution, and Relegitimation (with Mark Lichbach); Modest Claims: Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition; Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (with Robert Weller, Michael Puett, and Bennett Simon); Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity (with Robert Weller); Religious Education and the Challenge of Pluralism; and Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (with Rahel Wasserfall and David Montgomery). His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He founded the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life in Sarajevo in 2002 and facilitated its growth into CEDAR, and he received the prestigious Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize in 2020 for his work.

Job Titles:

• Professor of Sociology at Harvard University

Winship, the Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University obtained a bachelor's degree in sociology and mathematics from Dartmouth College and a PhD from Harvard University in 1977. Following a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin and a two-year fellowship at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (NORC), in 1980 he joined the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. During his 12 years there he directed the Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, chaired of the Department of Sociology for four years, was a founding member of the Department of Statistics, and held a courtesy appointment in Economics. From 1984 to 1986 he was director of the Economics Research Center at NORC. Winship has been a member of Harvard's Department of Sociology since 1992 and is currently conducting research on several topics: The Ten Point Coalition, a group of black ministers who are working with the Boston police to reduce youth violence; statistical models for causal analysis; the effects of education on mental ability; causes of the racial difference in performance in elite colleges and universities; and changes in the racial differential in imprisonment rates over the past 60 years.

Job Titles:

• Director of Program Development
• Research Professor

Montgomery is a research professor in the Department of Government and Politics and the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, and a former policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has conducted long-term anthropological field research in Central Asia and the Balkans, where his work focuses on the transmission of religious and cultural knowledge; the expressions of everyday religious life; and the social aspects of religious change. His books include Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan; Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (with Adam Seligman and Rahel Wasserfall); Everyday Life in the Balkans; and Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding. He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Emory University, and Boston University; worked as a legislative assistant for the U.S. House of Representatives; and served in the U.S. Peace Corps. He is an active member of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Job Titles:

• Expert

Sumka is an expert in post-conflict reconstruction and development in fragile and conflict-ridden regions, who recently completed a 25-year career with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). For more than 17 of those years, he lived and worked in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East, operating as the director of USAID country missions in Albania; Bosnia and Herzegovina; and, most recently, the West Bank and Gaza. He provided strategic leadership for programs in complex multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies that fostered economic, social, and political development and delivered humanitarian assistance. Sumka attained the rank of minister counselor in the U.S. Senior Foreign Service. In the West Bank and Gaza, he was intimately involved with U.S. efforts to stimulate and advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by helping to build the institutions of a Palestinian state. During his four-year tenure, USAID directed more than $1.6 billion toward this effort. In Sarajevo from 2002 to 2006, Sumka led USAID's programs to help rebuild Bosnia and Herzegovina's multi-ethnic society. As the USAID director in Albania from 1999 to 2002, he rebuilt the mission and its programs following two security-related evacuations, managed its assistance to Kosovo refugees in 1999, and then led an extensive array of development programs for Albania. Sumka's areas of technical expertise include low-cost shelter and urban development as well as governance and rule of law. Before joining USAID, he managed inner-city policy and research programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He received a PhD in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina and also holds degrees from the Stevens Institute of Technology and Northwestern University.

Job Titles:

• Director of the Balkan Summer School on Religion and Public Life

Schnitter, a native of Velingrad, Bulgaria, studies, specializes, and teaches in Plovdiv, Bulgaria; Freiburg, Würzburg, and Berlin, Germany; Vienna, Austria; and Florence and Venice, Italy. Her main areas of research include the Middle Ages, the history of everyday life, the history of worship, cultural and religious interactions, contacts and conflicts in the Balkans during the pre-modern age, and the role of religion in the postmodern world. Her major publications are devoted to the Orthodox ritual practices and she is involved in a project connected with research and publication of the Glagolitic monuments, financed by the Austrian Science Fund. Schnitter is one of the founders of the Department of Ethnology (1995) and became the first dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and History at the Paissiy Hilendarski University of Plovdiv in 2004. She has a son.

Job Titles:

• Director of the Equator Peace Academy

Ngabirano is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Ethics and Development Studies at Uganda Martyrs University, where he also heads the Department of Good Governance and Peace Studies and teaches ethics, religion, and development. He holds a PhD in theology from the Catholic University of Leuven and is involved in various research fields. Currently, he is part of a team conducting research on diversity, marginalization, and pluralism in Uganda.

Fredriksen teaches comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published widely on the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity and pagan-Jewish-Christian relations in the Roman Empire. The author of Augustine on Romans (Scholars Press 1982) and From Jesus to Christ (1988; 2000 Yale University Press), her Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (Vintage 1999), won a 1999 National Jewish Book Award. More recently, Fredriksen explored the development of Christian anti-Judaism, and Augustine's singular response to it, in Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (Doubleday 2010), and she investigated the shifting conceptions of God and of humanity in Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton University Press 2012). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has appeared widely in the media, both here and abroad, and has been featured on BBC, NBC, ABC, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel; she is also a contributor to the Washington Post and Newsweek. She and her family divide their time between Boston and Jerusalem.

Job Titles:

• Resident
• Director of Evaluation and Training

Wasserfall is a resident scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. She has wide-ranging experience in the evaluation of educational programs in complex multilingual and cross-cultural settings. Her work in the world of evaluation focuses on the pragmatic approach to knowledge that continually queries: "knowledge for whom and for which purposes." Previous assignments include: director of evaluation and liaison to schools of The Center for the Advancement of Hebrew Teaching and Learning, Inc. and senior research associate with Education Matters, Inc. and the Mandel Center for Jewish Education at Brandeis University. At CEDAR, she conducts the yearly evaluation of programs and is part of the leadership team. In the past year, she has moved into training and leading new program developments and evaluations internationally. An anthropologist with a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Wasserfall has gained expertise on three continents. She has published in the area of the anthropology of gender, pluralism and qualitative methods. She is the editor of Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law; coauthor of Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (with Adam Seligman and David Montgomery); and is currently working on a book titled Eating Together with Difference, based on her 14 years of evaluating the CEDAR network. As well, she is a committed yoga practitioner and certified teacher in the Iyengar tradition.