Biographies

José Casanova

José Casanova is one of the world's top scholars in the sociology of religion. He is a professor at the Department of Sociology at Georgetown University, and heads the Berkley Center's Program on Globalization, Religion and the Secular. He has published works in a broad range of subjects, including religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into seven languages, including Japanese, Arabic, Turkish and Indonesian. In 2012, Casanova was awarded the Theology Prize from the Salzburger Hochschulwochen in recognition of life-long achievement in the field of theology.
Casanova’s most recent research has focused primarily on two areas: globalization and religion, and the dynamics of transnational religion, migration, and increasing ethno-religious and cultural diversity. His research on religion and globalization has adopted an ambitious comparative perspective that includes Catholicism, Pentecostalism and Islam. Some of his recent articles in this area include Public Religions Revisited (in Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond the Concept, Fordham University Press, 2008), Nativism and the Politics of Gender in Catholicism and Islam (in Hanna Herzog and Ann Braude, ed., Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernities, Palgrave, 2009), and Exploring the Postsecular (in Craig Calhoun et al., ed., Habermas and Religion, Polity Press, 2013). Some of his essays have appeared in German in Europas Angst vor der Religion (Berlin University Press, 2009). His co-edited publications include Topographies of Faith: Religion in Urban Spaces (Brill, 2013), Secular and Sacred. The Scandinavian Case of Religion in Human Rights, Law, and Public Space (Vandenhoek&Ruprecht, 2013), and Church and People. Disjunctions in a Secular Age (The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2012).
His work on transnational migration and religion explores the incorporation of minorities and the construction of transnational networks, identities and structures. Some of his work in this area includes Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism: A EU/US Comparison (in Thomas Banchoff, ed., Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism, Oxford University Press, 2007). In addition, he has headed several major research projects focused on these topics, including Religion and Immigrant Incorporation in New York and The Religious Lives of Migrant Minorities: London, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur.

Sir David Chipperfield (London, UK)

David Chipperfield established David Chipperfield Architects in 1985. He was Professor of Architecture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart (Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design) from 1995 to 2001, and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University in 2011. He has taught and lectured worldwide at schools of architecture in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 2012 Chipperfield curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. He is an honorary fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the Bund Deutscher Architekten (Association of German Architects), and a past winner of the Heinrich Tessenow Gold Medal. In 2010 Chipperfield received the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, as well as the Grand DAI Award for Building Culture given by the Verband Deutscher Architekten- und Ingenieurvereine (associated societies of German architects and engineers). He holds honorary doctorates from Kingston University, UK (2009) and the University of Kent, UK (2010). In 2004 he was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to architecture. He was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry in 2006 and elected to the Royal Academy in 2008. In 2009 Chipperfield was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany – the highest tribute paid to individuals for service to the nation – and in 2010 he was knighted for his services to architecture in the UK and Germany. In 2011 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, and in 2013, the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, both given in recognition of a lifetime’s work.

Chris Granlund (London, UK)

Chris Granlund is a BAFTA, Grierson, and Royal Television Society award-winning executive producer. He has also produced and directed many documentaries and docudramas on the arts, current affairs, and popular history. He is currently producing Jungle Atlantis, a two-part exploration of the rise and fall of the Khmer Empire – the civilization that built Angkor Wat – and Sex and the West, a three-part series about the way Christianity has shaped the Western world’s attitudes to sexuality and gender, presented by Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch. His past credits include: The Plantagenets, presented by Professor Robert Bartlett, and The Silent War, a two-part series on submariners in the Cold War. He was series producer of Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, which won awards from RTS, Grierson, and BAFTA. He also produced the critically acclaimed BBC Two series The Normans and BBC One’s biggest-ever history project, History of the World.
Granlund was born in County Durham, England. He studied English literature and critical theory at the University of Wales, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the University of Illinois. His doctoral dissertation explored the development of the press under the Allied powers in Berlin after the Second World War. From 1988 to 1991, he was culture editor and then deputy editor of the monthly discussion journal Marxism Today. He joined the BBC as a researcher on The Late Show in August 1991. His films have been shown at festivals in Montreal, Naples, Rio de Janeiro, and Amsterdam. His Robert Rauschenberg profile, Man at Work, was screened at the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao as part of Rauschenberg’s 1997 retrospective. His docudrama Dickens: Secrets, presented by Peter Ackroyd, won the Best Arts Film prize at the 2003 Montreal Festival of Films on Art. Granlund lives in London with his husband and their two children.

Alexander Kluge (Munich, Germany)

Alexander Kluge, born in 1932, is a literary author and filmmaker. Kluge narrowly escaped death in the heavy bombardments of April 1945, and he portrayed this experience in Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945, which was first published in 1977. From 1949 he studied law, church music, and history in Marburg and Frankfurt am Main. In 1956 he obtained his doctorate in law with the dissertation Die Universitäts-Selbstverwaltung (University Self-Government). Theodor W. Adorno, with whom Kluge became friends in Frankfurt, put him in contact with the film director Fritz Lang. Kluge was a cosignatory of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto published by a group of filmmakers calling for a renewal of German film along the lines of the French “nouvelle vague.” His literary debut, Lebensläufe, was also published in 1962; in the fall of that year he gave his first reading with the “Gruppe 47.” In 1966 he won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his film Abschied von gestern. In the early 1970s he began a collaboration with Oskar Negt centering on the theoretical volumes Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (1972) and Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981). Beginning in the mid-1980s, Kluge focused on the commercial television audience. German law requires private broadcasting companies to give over a portion of their airtime to independent third parties. With his Development Company for Television Program (dctp), founded in 1988, Kluge secured airtime on private television – for both his own programming and the productions of partner companies such as Spiegel TV and stern TV. Dialog is at the heart of his cultural magazine programs, in which historical, aesthetic, scientific, or political questions are pursued in conversation with an expert from the respective field. Kluge also produces programs based on fabricated discussions featuring heavy use of the subjunctive. In such works with Peter Berling, Helge Schneider, or Hannelore Hoger, actual experience is not the starting point of the dialog; rather, the participants imagine and explore situations which might have taken place in a certain way. In his books, films, and television productions, the reality alongside the empirically perceptible world is central to Kluge’s method.
In 2000 Alexander Kluge returned to greater public awareness as an author with Chronik der Gefühle, a collection containing all of his stories published since his first book in 1962. In 2003 he was honored with the most important German literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize. Kluge’s literature is characterized by its “anti-rhetorical” bearing. He relies on a close connection between the words of the text and the objects or issues that they denote in reality, making use of the linguistic means that are available to us in daily communication. His stories make a lucid impression, yet in their totality and reciprocal commentary reveal an open narrative process.
Alexander Kluge received the German Film Award for his life’s work in 2008, the Theodor W. Adorno Award in 2009, and the Adolf Grimme Award in 2010.

Angelika Neuwirth (Berlin, Germany)

Angelika Neuwirth was educated in classical philology and Oriental studies (Arabic and Semitic studies) at the universities of Florence, Göttingen, Tehran, and Jerusalem, and at the Freie Universität Berlin. She earned her MA at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1970, and her doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1972 with the dissertation Abdallatif al-Baghdadis Kompendium zu Aristoteles’ Metaphysik, Buch Lambda. She gained her professorial qualification at the University of Munich in 1977 with her Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren. In 1977 she took up a guest professorship in Islamic philosophy at the University of Jordan, Amman (1977-1981), where she taught in Arabic. She then headed a department for Koranic studies at the Royal Academy for Islamic Civilization Research (Aal al-Bayt Institute), Amman (1981-1983). Following a teaching post at the University of Munich as a Heisenberg scholar (1984-1988), she accepted professorships at the University of Bamberg in 1988 and the Freie Universität Berlin in 1991. In 2007 she and her associates Michael Marx and Nicolai Sinai established the research project Corpus Coranicum at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Parallel to this, she has been involved in various projects conducted by fellows of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), temporarily served as codirector of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), and annually taught courses in the year-long theological study program at the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem.
In Germany Angelika Neuwirth has been eager to contribute to various scholarly initiatives pursued at the newly founded theology departments at various German universities. For her work in the area of hermeneutic translation between Islam and Europe, she has been honored with the Muhammad Nafi Tschelebi Award and membership in the Académie Tunisienne des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts. She has achieved further academic recognition in the USA, most notably in the form of an honorary doctorate from Yale University, a Mellon Fellowship at the University of Chicago, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the German-speaking countries, she has received honorary doctorates from the theological faculties of the universities of Bamberg, Salzburg, and Basel. She maintains membership in the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Focuses of her research include modern Arabic literature, particularly vis-à-vis Israeli literature, and, above all, the Koran as a text of the late antique period.

Saskia Sassen (New York, USA)

To the biography of Saksia Sassen

Richard Sennett (London, UK / New York, USA)

Richard Sennett has explored how individuals and groups make social and cultural sense of material facts – about the cities in which they live and about the labor they do. He focuses on how people can become competent interpreters of their own experience, despite the obstacles society may put in their way. His research entails ethnography, history, and social theory. As a social analyst, Sennett continues the pragmatist tradition begun by William James and John Dewey.
His first book, The Uses of Disorder (1970), looked at how personal identity takes form in the modern city. He then studied how working-class identities are shaped in modern society in The Hidden Injuries of Class, written with Jonathan Cobb (1972). This was followed by The Fall of Public Man (1977), a study of the public realm of cities. With Authority (1980), Sennett sought to give an accounting of the philosophic implications of his writings over the previous decade.
At this point he took a break from sociology, composing three novels: The Frog Who Dared to Croak (1982), An Evening of Brahms (1984), and Palais-Royal (1987). He then returned to urban studies with two books, The Conscience of the Eye (1990), which focused on urban design, and Flesh and Stone (1992), a general historical study of how bodily experience has been shaped by the evolution of cities.
In the mid-1990s, as the work-world of modern capitalism began to alter quickly and radically, Sennett launched a project charting its personal consequences for workers, which has carried him up to the present day. The first of these studies, The Corrosion of Character (1998), is an ethnographic account of how middle-level employees make sense of the “new economy.” The second in the series, Respect in a World of Inequality (2002), charts the effects that new ways of working have on the welfare state. A third, The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006), provides an overview of change. Most recently, Sennett has explored more positive aspects of labor in The Craftsman (2008) and Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (2012).
Among other awards, Richard Sennett has received the Hegel and Spinoza Prizes and an honorary degree from the University of Cambridge.

Joseph Vogl (Berlin, Germany)

Joseph Vogl is Professor of Modern German Literature, Cultural and Media Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as well as Permanent Visiting Professor at Princeton University. He has taught at institutions including Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, the University of California, Berkeley, and Indiana University Bloomington, USA, and has published numerous monographs and articles. In 1988 he received the DVA-Stiftung’s Translation Prize for the Promotion of Franco-German Relations for his translations of key works of modern French philosophy (including Gilles Deleuze: Difference and Repetition and J.-F. Lyotard: The Differend). His research focuses are the history and theory of knowledge; the history of danger and risk in the modern period; media and discourse theory; the history of literature from the 18th to the 20th century; and the “poetologies of knowledge” – the study of the relationships and interactions between forms of knowledge and poetic or aesthetic figures. He is the director or principal investigator of a range of research projects including Das Wissen der Literatur (PhD-Net), The Poetics of the Improbable (Collaborative Research Centre), and the Clusters of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung and Topoi. Among his most important written works are the monographs Ort der Gewalt. Kafkas literarische Ethik; Kalkül und Leidenschaft. Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen; Über das Zaudern; and Das Gespenst des Kapitals. He and Alexander Kluge jointly published the book Soll und Haben, a selection of their shared television discussions.