Professor Banchoff is director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and Associate Professor in the Government Department and the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. His research centers on religious and ethical issues in world politics. He recently published Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies (Cornell University Press, 2011). He is also the editor of Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2007), Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights, co-edited with Robert Wuthnow (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Two of Banchoff's previous books explored the intersection of history, institutions, and values in European politics: The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 1945-1995 (University of Michigan Press, 1999) and Legitimacy and the European Union: The Contested Polity, co-edited with Mitchell Smith (Routledge, 1999).

Banchoff received his BA from Yale (summa cum laude) in 1986, an MA from the University of Bonn in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton in 1993. He was a Conant fellow at Harvard's Center for European Studies in 1997-98 and a Humboldt Fellow at the Centre for European Integration Studies in Bonn in 2000-01. Banchoff was awarded the DAAD Award for Distinguished Scholarship in German studies in 2003.