Senior Fellows

Dena Fehrenbacher

Director and Senior Fellow

Dena Fehrenbacher is a teacher and scholar of American literature and culture, with particular interest in contemporary and diasporic literatures. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in ASAP/Journal and Post45. She received her PhD in English from Harvard University, and her BA in English and Economics from UC Berkeley. Between her undergraduate and graduate work, she taught English on a Fulbright grant in Bulgaria. She was a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Fellow in English at UC Berkeley from 2019-2021. She has taught courses in Berkeley’s English department fulfilling the university’s American Cultures requirement. She can be reached at director@binst.org.

Lara Buchak

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Her areas of research include decision theory, epistemology and philosophy of religion; she has written on topics including the rationality of faith and when one should stop one’s search for additional evidence. Buchak received her PhD from Princeton University in 2009. At UC Berkeley, she taught undergraduate courses in the philosophy of religion and in game theory, and she has taught graduate seminars on decision theory, the relationship between science and religion, and how social welfare depends on individual preference satisfaction. She is the author of Risk and Rationality (Oxford University Press, 2013), which addresses the question of how we should take risk into account in decision making.

Katie Peterson

Associate Professor of English at UC Davis

Katie Peterson is Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Davis where she teaches poetry workshops and courses on contemporary literature. She is the author of three books of poetry, This One Tree, Permission, and The Accounts, and the forthcoming collection, A Piece of Good News. Her edited selection of Robert Lowell’s poems, New Selected Poems, was published this last March. Her essays and reviews have appeared widely. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of Deep Springs College in rural Inyo County, California. She received a B.A. in English from Stanford and a PhD in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard. Katie and her husband live in Berkeley.

Anselm Ramelow

Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology

Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology and member of the Order of Preachers. A member of the Core Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Theological Union, Fr. Ramelow received his doctorate in Munich under the direction of Robert Spaemann. Areas of research and teaching include Free Will, the History of Philosophy and Aesthetics. Most recently he has worked on a philosophical approach to Miracles. He is author of Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl. Die Metaphysik der Willensfreiheit zwischen Antonio Perez und G.W. Leibniz (Brill, 1997), Beyond Modernism? George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology (Ars Una, 2005), and Thomas Aquinas: De veritate Q. 21-24; Translation and Commentary (Meiner, 2013). His articles have appeared in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Nova et Vetera, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly and Angelicum.

Karl van Bibber

Professor of Nuclear Engineering

Professor of Nuclear Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is also Executive Director of the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium, comprised of seven universities and four national laboratories. He received his MS and PhD in Physics from MIT; he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford, scientist and senior manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Vice President and Dean of Research at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award.