Katherine Marshall

Visiting Professor and Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs
Age: 67
Hometown: Born in Boston, Mass., lived all around the world
Education: B.A. Wellesley College, History; M.P.A. Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School; M.A. Princeton University, History; Honorary Doctorate, University of Cambodia
Area of research: Links between religion and development
Time at Georgetown: 8 years
Courses: Core development courses that cover how international development works, its institutional landscape and the ethical and moral issues part of development debates; courses on the links between development and religion, freshman seminar “Hotspots and Heroes”

What is the greatest challenge in your field today?
In the development field, I think the challenges are in many ways about communications, about ensuring both the perseverance and the energy that’s needed to translate what we know into practical solutions, and when you hit obstacles, which are often perceived as ethical differences, that we find ways to resolve them. In terms of the religion and development, it’s been remarkably difficult to reach what we thought would be a relatively easy stage of having an assumption or being clear that religion was an elementary, essential part of international affairs and that we needed to understand and approach it professionally, carefully, systematically, in the same way we deal with culture and sociology and politics and economics. We’ve found that there are some special features of religion that make it rather more difficult. The challenge is to have enough evidence to have enough information to convince people that they need to take religion seriously and to help to give them the tools that they need to do so.

What drew you to Georgetown?
Georgetown’s interest in the issues of development and in the complex issues which I call the ethical and moral was what initially drew me here. The opening of the Berkley Center was clearly the opportunity that made it possible to marry our different objectives and ideas.

Throughout your own education, how did you come to narrow your focus to what you’re studying and working on today?
I knew I wanted to work in international affairs and had grown up, in fact, living in a number of different countries. My father was working in international development, so I was very strongly drawn to that. I also came to understand that even though it sometimes was less exciting than working directly on the ground, approaching policy dimensions was more likely to have lasting impact. And so I became very much involved in development. The link to religion was much more accidental in that I was drafted by the World Bank’s president and became more and more fascinated by the topic and convinced that it was a sorely neglected one. The development agenda that we needed to learn about and that we needed to work through what its importance actually meant in terms of action.

How does the academic side of development work relate to the on-the-ground work you’ve discussed?
A major lesson that’s come for people who work on development is that evidence is absolutely critical. Evidence and ideas, in other words. If you don’t have knowledge, if you don’t have the information, if you don’t learn from experience, you can’t resolve problems and look toward a better solution. That’s, we hope, where the academic comes in because it gives you the tools and the opportunity to step back, to analyze, to learn and to start to help the next generation to get their start.

What would be your ideal course to teach?
My ideal course would be a development of the course I’m now teaching which is on the practice and ethics of development. What I like about the seminar format is that each class involves a lively discussion that’s based on a mix of different reading, but also some practical lessons, and what would be most exciting is if we were able to have people who were from different disciplines, but really at the cusp of getting ready to go and do things because then you could envisage the course as being a bridge between the intellectual and translating it into action.

Interview by Emma Hinchliffe