Dr. Betsy Mesard holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia’s Department of Religious Studies. She currently holds the position of Barbieri Scholar in the Humanities at Villanova University, where she teaches first-year students in the university's Augustine and Culture Seminar Program. She has also offered courses in Villanova's Ethics program and the department of Theology and Religious Studies, as well as in the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North Africa Studies program at Bryn Mawr College. Her research and teaching are centered in religious ethics, which examines the theological and moral underpinnings of arguments around topics such as war and violence, secularism and public life, economic justice, and medicine. Her work also engages substantially with philosophical texts and discourses and their complex relationship to religious reflection in the modern age. Betsy's dissertation research focused on the work and legacy of the Egyptian Islamist thinker and public intellectual, Abdelwahab Elmessiri, whose engagement with diverse streams of thought including English romanticism, critical theory, and Islamic philosophy shaped his account of Western modernity and his commitment to political change in Egypt.