Shahzad Bashir is Dean, Institute for the Study of Islamic Civilisations, Aga Khan University, London. He specializes in Islamic Studies with an interest in the intellectual and social histories of the societies of Iran and Central and South Asia circa fourteenth century CE to the present. His published work is concerned with the study of Sufism and Shi'ism, messianic movements originating in Islamic contexts, representation of corporeality in hagiographic texts and Persian miniature paintings, religious developments during the Timurid and Safavid periods, and modern transformations of Islamic societies. Professor Bashir is currently finishing a book entitled Islamic Pasts and Futures: Conceptual Explorations. This is a wide-ranging treatment that critiques the way Islamic history has been conceptualized in modern scholarship and suggests alternatives, with emphasis on the multiplicity of temporal configurations found in Islamic materials. This project engages contemporary academic debates regarding language, historiography, and history on the basis of materials of Islamic provenance.​

Sarah E. Igo is the Andrew Jackson Chair in American History and Dean of Strategic Initiatives at Vanderbilt University. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. As Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the College of Arts and Science, she led and implemented a far-reaching curricular reform that will launch in Fall 2025: the A&S College Core. She also co-directs the Open Dialogue Visiting Fellows Program. Igo was the inaugural Faculty Head of E. Bronson Ingram College and is a former director of Vanderbilt’s Program in American Studies. Professor Igo teaches and writes about modern U.S. cultural, intellectual, legal and political history, with special interests in the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the public sphere.

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College. His forthcoming book is "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Hoard Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It," scheduled to appear from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 2026. Trained in modern European intellectual history, he works on political and legal thought in modern times and on constitutional and international law in historical and current perspective. His most recent book is "Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times" (Yale University Press, 2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford. Moyn is a fellow of the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Over the years he has written in venues such as The Atlantic, Boston Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Shalini Randeria is President and Rector of Central European University. An American-born Indian social anthropologist/sociologist Shalini Randeria has had a distinguished academic career at institutions of higher education across Europe. She was Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, where she was also Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. She holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a research group on “soft authoritarianisms”. She was educated at the Universities of Delhi, Heidelberg and Oxford, where she belonged to the first cohort of women Rhodes Scholars. She received her PhD and her Habilitation from the Free University of Berlin. She has held faculty positions at the Free University, Berlin; the University of Munich and University of Zurich, where she was Professor of Social Anthropology and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Competence Centre. She was Founding Chair of CEU’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in Budapest. Currently she is Deputy Chair of the Class of Social and Related Sciences, Academia Europaea, Distinguished Fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, Canada, Distinguished Visiting Fellow of IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria and Member of the International Advisory Panel on Population and Development, UNFPA EECA group. She has served more recently on the Board of European Forum Alpbach and the CEU’s Board of Trustees.