Past Events

Oct

27

Lecture

Clash of Experts: Science and the Occult in the Ottoman Empire with A. Tunç Şen

Location:

Linderman Library, Room 200

October 27, 2026, 4:30 - 5:30pm

Who had the authority and expertise to predict the future in the past? And what did it mean to be an expert? These are the central questions I investigate in my book, Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600, which takes the Ottoman…

Feb

16

Lecture

Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt with Dr. Ahmad Shokr

Location:

STEPS 101

February 16, 2026, 4:30 - 5:30pm

This talk will examine the history of decolonization in Egypt through the lens of the country's prized export. By following transformations in the political economy and political meaning of cotton over half a century, it will explore how the dynamics of agrarian capitalism set…

Nov

12

Lecture

Print and the Urdu Public: Newspapers and Islam in Colonial India with Megan Eaton Robb

Location:

STEPS 101

November 12, 2025, 4:30 - 5:30pm

This talk will focus on Robb's book Print and the Urdu Public, an analysis of the development of Urdu journalism in colonial India through a microstudy of the newspaper Madinah. The newspaper connected an anti-colonial voice that contested not only British…

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…

College of
Arts and Sciences

Global Islamic Studies

Past Events

Oct

27

Clash of Experts: Science and the Occult in the Ottoman Empire with A. Tunç Şen

Feb

16

Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt with Dr. Ahmad Shokr

Nov

12

Print and the Urdu Public: Newspapers and Islam in Colonial India with Megan Eaton Robb

Sep

30

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

Sep

24

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

Apr

2

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

Mar

31

Academic Freedom in Times of Crisis with Maura Finkelstein

Mar

4

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

Feb

26

AI and Muslim Piety on TikTok with Christoph Günther

Feb

13

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

Oct

16

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

Oct

15

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