An expert in the field of human rights and religion in international affairs, since 1989 he has been a senior scholar in religion, ethics, and human rights at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., a congressionally funded research institute. He established the Institute's working group on religion, ideology, and peace in order to study religion, nationalism, and intolerance in light of the 1981 United Nations Declaration against Intolerance. Two of his books, Ukraine: The Legacy of Intolerance (1991) and Sri Lanka: The Invention of Enmity (1994), are based on the findings of that working group.

He has written extensively on American foreign policy and moral rhetoric; comparative religious ethics; church-state relations and religious freedom; Islamic activism and U.S. foreign policy; and Western and Islamic perspectives on religious liberty.

For 15 years, he was professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. He also taught ethics at Yale Divinity School and Amherst College, among other academic institutions. From 1988 to 1992, he served on the Harvard Board of Overseers Committee to Visit the Divinity School.

"The Dunphy professorship provides a groundbreaking opportunity for the Divinity School to promote a more adequate perspective on the intrinsic relationship of religion to broader political factors," said J. Bryan Hehir, professor of the practice in religion and society and chair of the Divinity School's Executive Committee. "Its location at the Divinity School will also add distinctive value to the University as a whole. While the topics of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and conflict are not new themes in world affairs, they stand in dramatically new relationship to one another in world history and global politics at the end of the 20th century. In David Little we will have a splendid teacher in these areas and a talented, innovative, committed colleague whose interdisciplinary scholarship will add immeasurably to our community."

Little will offer seminars and courses on religion, nationalism, and peace; religion and social theory; religion and human rights; and "Conscience and Its Freedom." "As the first occupant of the Dunphy chair, I embrace the exciting opportunity Mr. Dunphy has made possible and look forward to cooperating with others at the Divinity School and throughout the University in focusing attention on the subject of religion, ethnicity, and conflict," said Little.

T.J. Dermot Dunphy, M.B.A. '56, president and CEO of Sealed Air Corp. in Saddle Brook, N.J., endowed the new professorship last year "to promote greater understanding of the factors that make religions a force for belligerence and benevolence in the international arena and to examine the historical, sociological, and anthropological aspects of religion in shaping ethnic identities and communal relations in the contemporary world."