SHAHRZAD SABET
BENJAMIN SCHEWEL
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Shahrzad Sabet is Co-Director of the Center on Modernity in Transition and a Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. She has held positions at Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Harvard University, where she received her PhD. Dr. Sabet's research and training span a variety of disciplines, including political science, philosophy, economics, and psychology. She is currently working on a book entitled Securing Identity: The Case for Human Oneness, which explores how a reimagined universalism can fundamentally resolve the social and philosophical tensions around collective identity, and the surging identity politics to which they give rise. Her work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times and the Washington Post.
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Benjamin Schewel is Founder and Co-Director of the Center on Modernity in Transition (COMIT) and an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He has held positions at the universities of Duke, Oxford, Cambridge, and Groningen. He is the author of the book, Seven Ways of Looking at Religion (Yale University Press, 2017) and editor of the volumes, Religion and Public Discourse in an Age of Transition (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2018) and Religion and European Society (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019). His forthcoming book, Encountering the Axial Age: Karl Jaspers, World History, and the Future of Civilization, will also be published by Yale University Press.
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Shadi Anello is a Board Member of COMIT. She is a senior consultant under the Baha'i International Development Organization, where she oversees local action initiatives and field research related to community development and education for social transformation in North America and the Caribbean. Her academic work has explored inquiries into identity, belonging, and agency among place-based social actors.
GEOFFREY CAMERON
SHADI ANELLO
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Geoffrey Cameron is a Board Member of COMIT. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. He has a PhD from the University of Toronto and an MPhil from the University of Oxford. He is the co-editor of the books Strangers to Neighbours: Refugee Sponsorship in Context and Religion and Public Discourse in an Age of Transition: Reflections on Bahá’í Practice and Thought.
BENJAMIN P. DAVIS
MICHAEL KARLBERG
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Benjamin P. Davis is a Research Fellow at COMIT. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at Saint Louis University. He is the author of two books: Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics; and Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins. With Kris F. Sealey, he is also the co-editor of Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy.
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Michael Karlberg is a Board Member of COMIT. He is Professor of Communication Studies at Western Washington University. His interdisciplinary scholarship examines prevailing conceptions of human nature, power, social organization, and social change—and their implications for the pursuit of peace and justice. He is the author of the books Beyond the Culture of Contest and Constructing Social Reality: An Inquiry into the Normative Foundations of Social Change.
RABI MUSAH
LEE MILLER
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Rabi Musah is a Board Member of COMIT. She holds the Williams-Raycheff Chair in the Department of Chemistry and serves as the Associate Vice Provost of the Learning Commons at the State University of New York at Albany. Her federally funded scientific research covers various domains, including terrestrial plant chemical defense, environmental and atmospheric chemistry of plant-emitted volatiles, organosulfur natural products, forensic chemistry of psychoactive plants, and wildlife forensics. Additionally, she conducts research on the retention of students in STEM fields in higher education. With over 100 peer-reviewed publications, her work has been featured in prominent outlets including PBS' NOVA, Scientific American, New Scientist (UK), Forensic Magazine, Chemical and Engineering News, Science, and others.
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Lee Miller is a Senior Research Fellow at COMIT. He is a Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law School, where he teaches on agricultural and environmental law. Miller also has amassed expertise in environmental advocacy, policy innovation, and coalition-building in U.S. food and farm movements. At the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, Miller coordinated a multi-law school farm bill research project promoting agricultural sustainability and justice. He lives on a small farm outside Hillsborough, NC, where he and his spouse tend to sheep, bees, and vegetables.
DAVID A. PALMER
TARA RAAM
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David A. Palmer is a Board Member of COMIT. He holds a Ph.D. from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, and is a Professor of anthropology jointly appointed by the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Sociology of the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China and the co-editor of Daoism in the Twentieth Century: Between Eternity and Modernity.
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Tara Raam collaborates with COMIT. She is a neuroscientist and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research examines the neural mechanisms that enable social groups to respond to environmental stressors together, as a model to understand the relationship between the individual and the collective. She is broadly interested in themes related to human nature, harmony of science and religion, and intersections between biology and social reality.
SINA RAHMANIAN
JESSICA RELYEA
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Sina Rahmanian collaborates with COMIT. He is one of the Directors of the Baha’i International Development Organization. In this capacity, he helps oversee a global learning process around the social and economic development initiatives of the Baha’i community, encompassing over 5,000 of ongoing community-based projects and over 150 regional or national NGOs in areas including youth empowerment, primary and secondary education, local economic development, agricultural research, humanitarian relief, and media and technology.
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Bio Coming Soon
KERILYN SCHEWEL
KEVIN A. SABET
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Kerilyn Schewel is a Board Member of COMIT. She is co-director of the Duke Program on Climate-Related Migration and Lecturing Fellow in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Her research examines the relationship between migration and development, with a current focus on immobility, rural livelihoods, and climate change. Her book, Moved by Modernity: How Development Shapes Migration in Rural Ethiopia, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
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Kevin A. Sabet is a Board Member of COMIT. He is an affiliate of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Medical School at Yale University as well as an author, consultant, and advisor to three U.S. presidential administrations He has studied, researched, written about, and implemented drug policy for 25 years. He is the author of Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know.
DERIK SMITH
ZHAOYUAN WAN
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Derik Smith is a Board Member of COMIT. He is Chair of the Department of Literature at Claremont McKenna College and an affiliate faculty in the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies at the Claremont Colleges. He is the author of Robert Hayden In Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era. Since 2012, in New York and California, Smith has been teaching courses in and about American prisons. He also serves on the executive board of Starting Over Inc., a non-profit organization focused on policy advocacy, re-entry services, and transitional housing in Southern California, where he lives with his wife and three children.
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WAN Zhaoyuan, DPhil (Oxon), is associate professor of the history of science at the Centre for Studies of Values and Culture & the School of Philosophy, Beijing Normal University, China. His research interests include science and religion, Newton studies, cosmopolitanism, and the history of scientific thought. His publications include Science and the Confucian Religion of Kang Youwei (1858–1927): China Before the Conflict Thesis (Brill, 2022) and a dozen translations of religious and educational texts into Chinese. His papers are featured in Annals of Science, Modern Asian Studies, Studies in World Religions (Chinese), and Journal of Dialectics of Nature (Chinese).