Past Events

Sep

30

Lecture

Islamic Religious Authority: Thinking about Continuity and Change with Ismail Fajrie Alatas

Location:

BI 108

September 30, 2025, 4:30 - 5:30pm

This talk explores the relations that make up the dynamic of continuity and change in Islamic religious authority. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s theorization of authority along with historical and ethnographic cases from across the Muslim world, the talk identifies three core…

Sep

24

Lecture

The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt with Yasmin Moll

Location:

STEPS 101

September 24, 2025, 4:30 - 5:30pm

This talk explores the social life of theology in relation to both Islamic television production and the 2011 Tahrir Square uprising. Based on fieldwork in the Cairo branch of the world’s first Islamic television channel, it traces the ways in which pious struggles over the…

Apr

2

Lecture

Warzone Ecology: What Birding in Iraq Tells Us About Environmental Justice with Bridget Guarasci

Location:

STEPS 101

April 2, 2025, 4:30 - 6pm

This talk develops the conceptual framework “warzone ecology” to analyze how war and the biosphere have been forged in inextricable relation in Iraq, thereby rejecting any facile distinctions between nature and culture in order to emphasize mutuality, intra-activity, and…

Mar

31

Lecture

Academic Freedom in Times of Crisis with Maura Finkelstein

Location:

Rauch 091

March 31, 2025, 4:30 - 5:30pm

Recently, talk of “academic freedom” and “student safety” have become all consuming on college and university campuses across the US. But what do we mean by “academic freedom”? And what do we mean by “student safety”? This talk will consider these questions within the context of…

Mar

4

Lecture

Made to Move: Placemaking and Accumulated Attachments among Palestinian Refugees from Syria with Matthew DeMaio

Location:

Linderman Library, Room 200

March 4, 2025, 4:30 - 6pm

For the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had long lived in Syria as refugees, the advent of civil war in 2011 occasioned not a first experience of displacement but rather another iteration of enforced migration, necessitating encounters with new places of refuge…

Feb

26

Lecture

AI and Muslim Piety on TikTok with Christoph Günther

Location:

STEPS 101

February 26, 2025, 4:30 - 6pm

The use of AI to create videos on social media is a growing phenomenon. This presentation examines the ways in which Muslim content creators utilize AI- generated texts and images to illustrate Qur'anic passages and hadith narrations, creating visually engaging content to…

Feb

13

Lecture

Asia’s Forgotten Sinographers: On Indian and Middle Eastern Understandings of China with Nile Green

Location:

STEPS 101

February 13, 2025, 4:30 - 6pm

How in modern times did Indian and Middle Eastern authors write about China? What enabled their ventures of inter-Asian understanding? And what mechanisms, barriers, and misapprehensions shaped the contours of these South and West Asian Sinographies? This lecture addresses these…

Oct

16

Lecture

Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire with SherAli Tareen

Location:

STEPS 101

October 16, 2024, 4:30 - 5:30pm

Perilous Intimacies explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Based on the close reading of an expansive and multifaceted archive of Arabic, Persian,…

Oct

15

Lecture

Beyond Sectarianism: Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, and Formations of Religious Identity in Early Islam with Tehseen Thaver

Location:

STEPS 101

October 15, 2024, 4:30 - 5:30pm

In her new book, Beyond Sectarianism, Tehseen Thaver offers a fundamental reevaluation of how one should think about the relationship between the Qur’an, Shi‘ism, and religious identity. This book focuses on the literary Arabic Qur’an exegesis of the highly influential yet less…

Sep

24

Lecture

What is Muslim Cinema? with Kristian Petersen

Location:

STEPS 101

September 24, 2024, 4:30 - 6pm

At a moment when Muslims are so frequently vilified in popular media, what can be learned by focusing on cinema where Muslim creatives are in control and testify to their own self-presentation? In this presentation, Petersen offers an analytical framework that can register and…

May

2

Lecture

Migratory Adventure and Religious Experiences in a Provincial Malian Town with André Chappatte

Location:

BI 108

May 2, 2024, 4:15 - 5:45pm

Presented by the Africana studies program, the global studies program, and the Center for Global Islamic Studies, André Chappatte is an assistant professor of anthropology at the Global Studies Institute, University of Geneva.

Apr

9

Class/Workshop

Complicating Queerness in the Middle East with Madian al-Jazerah

Location:

Humanities Center

April 9, 2024, 7 - 9pm

Presented by Lehigh University Global Studies, the Center for Global Isalmic Studies, the Pride Center, and the Humanities Center, Madian al-Jazerah, activist, entrepeneur, and author of Are You This? Or Are You This? will be joinging us for a dinner conversation around…