Najeeba Syeed is the inaugural El-Hibri endowed chair and executive director of Interfaith at Augsburg. She has been a professor, expert practitioner, and public speaker for the last two decades in the fields of conflict resolution, interfaith studies, mediation, education, deliberative democracy, social, gender and racial equity.

From 2010-2020, she was an Associate Professor of Interreligious Education at Claremont School of Theology. Under her leadership, the two conflict resolution centers she led received the Jon Anson Ford Award for reducing violence in schools and in interracial gang conflict and was named Southern California Mediation Association’s “Peacemaker of the Year” in 2007. She has chaired national conferences on Muslim and Interfaith Peacebuilding, served as a mediator in many cases, started restorative justice mediation programs in many institutions including University of Southern California and several middle and high schools. Her track record as a peacemaker and critical peace researcher has made her a sought-out advisor and she has served as an on the ground peace interventionist in conflicts around the globe. Syeed’s peace and justice work has been the subject of news reports and documentaries.

She is a 1995 graduate of Guilford College where she received the Oexmann Fellowship for community-based mediation and was awarded the 2012 Young Alumni Achievement Award. She is a 2000 graduate of Indiana University Maurer School of Law where she was a teaching fellow in mediation and ran the university’s mediation program. In 2021, she was awarded the Litterarum Humanarum Doctor (Doctor of Humane Letters) from Starr King School for the Ministry.

Kaitlin B. Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity and how that shifts throughout our lives. She also speaks on these topics to diverse audiences who are interested in truth-telling and healing. As an inter-spiritual advocate, Kaitlin participates in conversations on topics such as colonialism in faith communities, and she has spoken at many conferences on the importance of inter-faith relationships. Besides her books, Kaitlin has written online for Sojourners, Religion News Service, Apartment Therapy, On Being, SELF Magazine, and more. Her work has been featured on CBS and in USA Today. She also writes at The Liminality Journal. Kaitlin lives in Philadelphia with her family.