Who We Are

Reset Dialogues on Civilizations Board of Governors

Giuliano Amato, Giancarlo Bosetti, Nina zu Fürstenberg (director), Georg Francesco Micheli (vice-president), Attorney Piergaetano Marchetti, Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (president).

Reset Dialogues on Civilizations Scientific Committee

Giuliano Amato (president), Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Abdou Filali-Ansary, Seyla Benhabib, Giancarlo Bosetti, Fred Dallmayr, Silvio Fagiolo, Maria Teresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri, Nina zu Fürstenberg, Timothy Garton Ash, Anthony Giddens, Vartan Gregorian, Renzo Guolo, Hassan Hanafi, Roman Herzog, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Jörg Lau, Amos Luzzatto, Avishai Margalit, Krzysztof Michalski, Andrea Riccardi, Olivier Roy, Otto Schily, Karl von Schwarzenberg, Roberto Toscano, Bassam Tibi, Nadia Urbinati, Umberto Veronesi, Michael Walzer.


PROFILES

Giuliano Amato is currently serving as Minister of Domestic Affair in Italy.  He is professor of constitutional law at La Sapienza University of Rome and at the European Institute in Florence. He served as Secretary of the Treasury in Italy and was the Italian Prime Minister in 1992-‘93 and in 2000-‘01. He was the vice-chairman of the Convention for the European Constitution.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd serves as Professor of Litterature and Linguistics at Leiden University and holds the Ibn Rushd Chair of Islam and Humanism at the University of Humanistics, Utrecht. He is the author of: Una vita con l’Islam (il Mulino, Bologna, 2005) and Islam e storia: critica del discorso religioso (Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2002).

Abdullahi An-Na’im graduated in Law in England. He joined the Islamic reform movement of Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha from 1968 until the movement was suppressed in December 1984. Forced to exile, in 1993 he became the executive director of the Washington D.C-based human right organization Africa Watch. Since 1995 he has been serving as a professor at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta.

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics. Professor Benhabib was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2006-07. She is the author of several books, including The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004). A new book, Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, has appeared from Oxford University Press in 2006.

Giancarlo Bosetti is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Italian cultural magazine Reset. He teaches Sociology of Communication at the Third University of Rome.

Fred R. Dallmayr is a political theorist specialized in comparative philosophy, particularly non-Western political thought, cross-cultural dialogue, and global human rights. He received NEH and Fulbright fellowships. Since 1994 he has been a fellow of the Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of Dialogue among civilizations (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002).

Silvio Fagiolo has been the Italian Ambassador in Germany since February 2001. During his diplomatic carrier he served as First Secretary at the Italian Embassy in Moscow, as Counsellor at the Embassy in Bonn, and as Minister Counsellor at the Italian embassy in Washington. He has been Permanent Representative at the European Union in Brussels.

Abdou Filali-Ansary is the director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations at Aga Khan University in London. He serves on the advisory board of several academic and cultural institutions. He is a member of the Journal of Democracy’s editorial board.

Maria Teresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri serves as professor of Medieval philosophy at Milan University. Her publications include: Il pensiero politico medievale (Laterza, 2004), and Federico II. Ragione e fortuna (Laterza, 2005).

Timothy Garton Ash serves as director of the European Studies Centre at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University where he is also professor of European Studies. He has received several honours and awards. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review Books.

Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) which he led from 1997 to 2003, he was previously a fellow and professor of Sociology at King's College, Cambridge. In 1985, he co-founded the academic publishing house Polity Press. More recently, he has served as an advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In May 2004 he received the title of Lord.

Vartan Gregorian has been the president of Carnegie Corporation of New York since 1997. He previously served as president of Brown University and director of the Public Library of New York. He serves on several boards and received many awards and honours including the National Humanities Medal (1998) and the Medal of Freedom (2004). He is the author of Islam: a Mosaic, not a Monolith (Brooking Institution Press, 2003).

Renzo Guolo serves as professor of Sociology of Islam at Turin University. He  writes for the Italian daily La Repubblica. His research interests focus on issues concerning the relationship between religion and politics, contemporary fundamentalisms, conflict and integration in multicultural society and the cultural dimension of globalization. His books include Il Partito di Dio. L’islam radicale contro l’Occidente (Guerini, 2004), I fondamentalismi (Laterza 2002), America/Islam (Donzelli, 2003) e Il volto del Nemico: fondamentalismi e religione (Eut, 2006).

Hassan Hanafi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cairo where he has been Chairman of the Department of Philosophy since 1988. Throughout his career, Hanafi showed an interest in exploring both Islamic philosophic traditions and Western philosophy and in developing relationships between these cultural heritages.

Roman Herzog was the President of the German Republic from 1994 to 1999. Previously he was a professor of Law at Munich University, and the Free University of Berlin where he also served as rector. During his political career he was also the State Ministry of Interior and the vice-president of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany in Karlsruhe. He co-authored with Bassam Tibi Preventing the clash of civilizations (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

Ramin Jahanbegloo was born in Tehran, Iran. He received his B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy, History and Political Science and later his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Sorbonne University. He is currently head of Department for Contemporary Studies, CRB-Iran.

Jörg Lau is editor of the German weekly paper Die Zeit, based in the Berlin office. He writes about integration and immigration issues and recently has been focusing on cultural debates about the role of religion and the dialogue between the “West” and “Islam”. Prior to his position at Die Zeit, he was in charge of the literary desk at Die Tageszeitung, a Berlin based daily paper. He has written a biography of German poet and essayist Magnus Enzensberger, published by Suhrkamp in 2000.

Amos Luzzatto, physician and biblicist, is the president of the Italian Union of the Jewish communities. Among his publications: Autocoscienza e identità ebraica, in Storia d'Italia. Annali, XI.2 (1997), Una lettura ebraica del Cantico dei cantici (Firenze, 1997), and Leggere il Midrash (Brescia, 1999).

Piergaetano Marchetti is one of the most notable Italian notary public. He is the chairman of RCS Media Group and RCS Quotidiani. He serves as Professor of Commercial Law at Bocconi University of Milan where he also serves as pro-rector.

Avishai Margalit is the Schulman Professor of Philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and Oxford universities and a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin. He is currently Senior Global Research Fellow at New York University School of Law.

Krzysztof Michalski is the rector of the Institut der Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna, and serves as a professor of philosophy at Boston University and Warsaw University. Pope John Paul II’s last book, Memoria e Identità (Rizzoli 2004), derived from a dialogue between Tischner and him during the Castelgandolfo Seminars which Michalski organized.

Francesco Micheli is a member of the board of several companies and cultural institutions. In Italy he has managed successful economical and financial initiatives: the acquisition and development of Finarte, the creation of of Fastweb, e.Biscom and Genextra.

Andrea Riccardi is the founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio. He serves as professor of History of Christianity and History of Religions at the Third University of Rome. He was among the mediators in the negotiates that, after 16 years of war, brought the peace back to Mozambic. In 2004 he won the Balzan Award for Peace.

Olivier Roy was research director at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) in the “Monde Iranien” research unit. He currently lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (IEP) in Paris and has been serving as the French Foreign Ministry’s advisor since 1984.

Otto Schily, founding member of German Green Party, is the Former Minister of Interior of Germany and currently serves as Federal Member of the German Parliament. He is also Member of the German Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Karl von Schwarzenberg is currently serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech republic. Previously he was member of the Czech Senate. He is the former chancellor of Vaclav Havel at the presidency of the Czech republic and president of the International Helsinki Federation.

Bassam Tibi is one of the most notable scholars of fundamentalism and Islamic culture. Since 1973 he has been serving as Professor of International Relations at Göttingen University, Germany. Since July 2004 he holds the A.D. White Professorship-at-Large, at Cornell University, USA. He co-authored with Roman Herzog Preventing the clash of civilizations (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

Georg Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza is the chairman and CEO of the TBG Group, an international financial group operating in industry and services. He is currently the Trustee of the Salk Institute for biological research.

Roberto Toscano is the Italian Ambassador in Teheran. In the diplomatic carrier since 1969, he directed for several years the activities of the analysis and programming unit of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He published several essays on the topics of human rights and of the ethics of international relationships. He taught International Relationships at LUISS University in Rome.

Nadia Urbinati is a political theorist. She served as adjunct professor at N.Y. University and the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently serving at Columbia University. She is member of Reset’s editorial board.

Umberto Veronesi is the Director of the European Institute of Oncology. He served as Italian Minister of Health from 1998 to 2001. He is the author of Il Diritto di Morire (Mondadori, 2005), and wrote the preface to the Italian edition of  Islam. A Mosaic not a Monolith by Vartan Gregorian.

Nina zu Fürstenberg is a journalist and a member of Reset’s executive group. She is the author of Lumi dell’Islam, nove intellettuali parlano di libertà, (Reset/Marsilio, 2004).

Michael Walzer is a political philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is the editor-in-chief of the American cultural magazine Dissent and a contributing editor to The New Republic. He is the author of Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with historical Illustrations, Spheres of Justice: A defense of Pluralism and Equality, and The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the 20th Century.