SHAHRZAD SABET

BENJAMIN SCHEWEL

  • Shahrzad Sabet is Co-Director of the Center on Modernity in Transition and a Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. Her research and training span a variety of disciplines, including political science, philosophy, economics, and psychology. She has held positions at Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Harvard University, where she received her PhD, and her work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is currently working on a book entitled The Crisis of Identity and the Case for Human Oneness, which argues that only a universal human identity can fundamentally resolve the tensions around group identities, and reconcile the oneness and diversity of humankind.

  • 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.

  • Shadi Anello is a Doctoral Fellow at COMIT and a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines how recognition and belonging are shaped in contexts of protracted displacement. More broadly, her work engages epistemological approaches that integrate theory with lived experience, foster collaborative inquiry, and move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.

GEOFFREY CAMERON

SHADI ANELLO

BENJAMIN P. DAVIS

MICHAEL KARLBERG

DAVID A. PALMER

TARA RAAM

  • Tara Raam is a Research Fellow at 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

  • Sina Rahmanian a Doctoral Fellow at 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.

LEE MILLER

  • Lee Miller is a Senior Fellow and co-director of the Rural Futures Lab 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.

  • Kevin A. Sabet is a Faculty Fellow at 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.

SHAYDA SABET-HATAMI

KEVIN A. SABET

  • Shayda Sabet-Hatami is the Associate Director, leading Operations at COMIT, with a multidisciplinary background in startup operations and evidence-based policy. She has led systems implementation initiatives across sectors, including consumer goods and international development. She holds a Master of Public Administration from Syracuse University and a BA in Economics and International Relations from the University of British Columbia.

DERIK SMITH

  • Derik Smith is a Faculty Fellow at 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 Poetryand theBlack 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.

KERILYN SCHEWEL

  • Kerilyn Schewel is a Senior Fellow and co-director of the Rural Futures Lab at COMIT. She is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research explores the causes and consequences of human migration and immobility, with particular attention to issues of gender, generation, education, rural development, and climate change. She combines qualitative and quantitative methods to provide deeper insights into why people move, why others stay, and how societies can respond to the challenges and opportunities of migration. Her first book is Moved by Modernity: How Development Shapes Migration in Rural Ethiopia.

JAMES SAMIMI FARR

  • James Samimi Farr is the Associate Director of Programs, leading the conceptual unfolding of COMIT’s lines of inquiry. He holds a Master’s in Public Policy from McGill University, and has a background in media and journalism. For years, James developed and convened the Critical Media Roundtable, a national community of media professionals working to evolve the norms of their practice, which included journalists from The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. His work has led him to collaborations with the On Being Project, the Aspen Institute, and the Solutions Journalism Network.