Meet the Team

Distinguished University Professor, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, John L. Esposito is Founding Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. Esposito has served as consultant to the U.S. Department of State and other agencies, European and Asian governments and corporations, universities, and the media worldwide. He is a former President of…

Mobashra Tazamal is the Associate Director of The Bridge Initiative, specializing in the impact of the War on Terror discourse and state-sponsored Islamophobia worldwide. As an expert in the field, she serves as a key resource for educators and journalists, with her analysis cited in major global outlets such as The New York Times, NBC, Salon, The Washington Post, and Al Jazeera. She authored a chapter in the edited volume Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism (Oxford…

Farid Hafez has been Class of 1955 Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Studies at Williams College since 2021. Before, he was a researcher at lecturer at Salzburg University, Department of Political Science and Sociology. In 2017, Farid was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at University of California, Berkeley and in 2014, a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York City. He is the founding editor of the German-English Islamophobia Studies Yearbook (since…

Professor Josef Meri was most recently a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s branch campus in Qatar and served as a research affiliate at the Alwaleed Center from 2021 to 2024. In June 2024, he was appointed Senior Fellow. His extensive background in the academic study of interfaith relations in past and present in the Middle East and global contexts, Middle Eastern and Islamic history, and the history of religions has…

Susan Douglass received a PhD in world history from George Mason University in 2016, and holds an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Her research field is education history and policy in teaching about the world and world religions. She works on instructional design, and has published widely on American textbooks and curriculum standards policy, and has authored teaching resources for Unity Productions Foundation films,…