Building Bridges Seminar

Catherine Cornille is a professor and Newton College Alumnae Chair of Western Culture in the Theology Department at Boston College. She is the author of numerous publications including The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue (2008) and Meaning and Method in Comparative Theology (2019).

Lejla Demiri is chair of Islamic doctrine and executive director of the Center for Islamic Theology at the University of Tübingen. Her research interests include the history of Islamic theology, Islam and religious pluralism, Christian-Muslim theological interactions, Ottoman intellectual history, and Islamic manuscripts. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from Marmara University (Istanbul), licentiate degree and postgraduate diploma from the Pontifical Gregorian University (Rome), and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She held postdoctoral fellowships at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (2007–2010) and the Free University of Berlin (2010-2012). She is the author of Muslim Exegesis of the Bible in Medieval Cairo (2013). She also serves as team leader (Middle East and North Africa) and section editor (Turkish world) for the CMR1900 project: Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History (1500–1900) (2012–present) and publishes extensively on theological and interfaith matters.

Rev. Daniel Madigan, S.J., is the Matteo Ricci Professor of Interreligious Theology and director of the Loyola Institute at Australian Catholic University. He is also rector of Newman College at the University of Melbourne. From 2008 to 2021 he was the Jeanette W. and Otto J. Ruesch Family Associate Professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies; he continues to be a faculty fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and associate professor emeritus at Georgetown. He has been involved with the annual Building Bridges Seminar since 2003 and in 2012 was appointed chair. His interests include Qur’anic studies, interreligious dialogue, and comparative theology, with a special focus on Muslim-Christian relations. Madigan previously taught in Rome (2000-2007), where he was the founder and director of the Pontifical Gregorian University's Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures. He is the author of The Qur’an’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture (2001) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an (2022). Madigan holds a B.A. from Monash University, B.D. from Melbourne College of Divinity, and M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Youshaa Patel is an associate professor of religious studies at Lafayette College. His scholarship explores how Islam has shaped—and been shaped—by Muslim interfaith encounters in the Middle East and beyond. He is author of The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (2022), which was named a finalist for two American Academy of Religion book awards: “Best First Book in the History of Religions” and “Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Textual Studies.” His work has been supported by grants from Mellon, Fulbright, and the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, and includes extended research stays in India, Qatar, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria. Recently, Patel was the Abdul Aziz Al-Mutawa visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, an independent center of the University of Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. from Duke University.

Monique Scheer is vice-president for international affairs and diversity and co-director of the Center for Religion, Culture, and Society at the University of Tübingen. Her teaching and research combine ethnological and historical methods in the analysis of everyday cultural phenomena in Europe during the modern period; she has worked on emotions and questions around faith and conviction, whether religious or secular. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Tübingen.