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KEYNOTE LECTURES 2026
 

RELIGION AND (IN)EQUALITIES

 

​​Social inequalities — such as poverty, social exclusion, and discrimination — along with legal inequalities and gender disparities, lie at the heart of many challenges that shape modern societies. Religions have historically contributed to the emergence of various forms of inequality, for example by promoting hierarchical views of society, yet they have also played crucial roles in mitigating and reducing inequalities through commitments to equal dignity, charity, social welfare, peace, and justice. This call for papers invites contributions that examine both religion as a general social and cultural phenomenon shaping notions of equality and hierarchy, and the ways in which religions — understood as diverse traditions, institutions, and actors — have variously reinforced or challenged specific forms of (in)equality.


EuARe 2026 will feature keynote speakers from theology, the social sciences, history, and law to explore the multifaceted relationships between religion and the problematics of (in)equalities. At the same time, the annual EuARe conference warmly invites both longstanding and new members to join the conversation on this theme and beyond, providing a venue for sharing and developing research in an interdisciplinary context dedicated to the study of religion in all its dimensions.

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Yann Algan

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Building Trust Across Divides: Emotions, Inequalities, and Policy Views

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Yann Algan is the Dean of the HEC Centers and Institutes and Professor of Economics at HEC. His research focuses on the role of emotions, trust, and well-being within organizations and societies. In particular, he has written seminal papers on the causal impact of trust on economic growth, institutions, populism, and management. He also focuses on the future of work (innovative firm organization, IA and new skills, aspirations of new generations) and the evaluation of management, employment and educational policies. In 2010 he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for his project “Trust”. In 2015, he received a second ERC grant, a consolidator one, for the project “Sowell” on Social Preferences, Well-Being, and Policy”. He was the former Dean and founder of the School of Public Affairs at Sciences Po and Dean of programs at HEC.
 

Tamar Herzig

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Religion, Slavery, and Gender in Mediterranean Europe, 1500-1800

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Tamar Herzig holds the Konrad Adenauer Chaired Professorship in Comparative European History at Tel Aviv University, where she also serves as Director of the Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization. She currently leads the project "Female Slavery in Mediterranean Catholic Europe, 1500-1800 (FemSMed)," which is funded by the European Research Council's Advanced Grant (2024-2029). Her research interests lie at the intersection of religious, social, and gender history, with a particular emphasis on the persecution of marginalized groups in Mediterranean Europe. Her work has explored inquisitorial networks, the gendering of demonological notions, religious dissent, the policing of sodomy, religious conversion, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 2008); ‘Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman’: Lucia Brocadelli, Heinrich Institoris, and the Defense of the Faith (Storia e Letteratura, 2013), and A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Harvard, 2019), which was awarded honorable mention for the Renaissance Society of America’s Gordan Book Prize and won the American Historical Association’s Dorothy Rosenberg Prize for the Best Book on the History of the Jewish Diaspora

Paolo Benanti

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AI and Digital Technologies: Challenges for (In)equality

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Paolo Benanti is a Third Order Regular of St. Francis and Associate Professor at Luiss Guido Carli University of Rome. He specializes in ethics, bioethics, and ethics of technologies. His work focuses on managing innovation: the impact of the internet and the digital age, the use of biotechnology for ameliorating human conditions and biosecurity, neurosciences, and neurotechnology. In 2018, he was selected by the Ministry of Economic Development as one of the thirty experts entrusted with the task of developing national strategies on artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies. On the 12th of February 2021, he was appointed by Pope Francis as an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Winnifred Sullivan

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​Making a King: The Political Theology of Joan of Arc

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Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (J.D., Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Provost Professor Emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2005) and Church State Corporation (The University of Chicago Press, 2020). Her research understands religion as a broad and complex social and cultural phenomenon that is deeply entangled with law. In particular, she focuses on understanding the phenomenology of religion under the modern rule of law. Using the resources of legal anthropology, socio-legal studies and the academic study of religion, her work analyses the multiple and contending models of and discourses about religion in modern statehood.

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