LGBTIQ+ scholars, friends, family, and allies are warmly welcomed to the LGBTIQ+ Status Committee's annual reception! Come greet old friends, make new ones, build your networks, and enjoy a convivial evening.
The Committee on the Status of LGTBIQ+ Persons in the Profession cordially invites all LGBTIQ+ scholars, of all ranks and places/forms of employment/under-employment, to join us for our annual mentoring lunch. This year, instead of inviting specific mentors, we welcome all scholars interested in offering mentoring, receiving mentoring, or both. Table topics will include mid-career scholars, administrators & senior scholars, wellness and joy, publishing your first book, journal publishing, the job market, navigating grad school, and careers beyond the ivory tower. In order to make the mentoring lunch as accessible as possible, we do not require pre-registration and we do not provide pre-paid lunches; attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches if they want or need to do so.
This roundtable will reflect on the current status and future directions for trans scholars and trans scholarship in the study of religion. We will hear from innovative scholars across the field on the conditions for trans scholars today and how we hope to see these conditions improve in the future, as well as on the present and future of trans scholarship in the field. How might trans scholars best be able to thrive in the study of religion, particularly given entrenched resistance to trans life from many religious leaders across the globe? What transformative scholarship will the present and future generations of trans scholars of religion contribute to our guild?
The Status of People with Disabilities in the Profession Committee (PWD) will host a luncheon for scholars and students with disabilities, as well as anyone interested in disability issues in the Academy. The luncheon will offer opportunities for mentoring and informal connections with colleagues.
This is a closed meeting for members of the status of people with disabilities in the profession committee. This status committee works to assure the full access and belonging of people with disabilities within the Academy and to advance their status within their professions. For information on how to get involved with this committee, please reach out to committee chair, Nick Shrubsole, at Nicholas.Shrubsole@ucf.edu
This session presents scholars who have published books in the discipline of women’s studies, gender, theology, and religion in 2023-2024. This panel’s authors will provide an overview of their books and share their perspectives on current research being published on women and gender studies. The authors will also discuss how they visualize their books in constructing knowledge and influencing the public sphere. In addition, these scholars will share their experiences regarding strategies and mechanics for publishing women’s studies in theology and religion books and offer advice for those seeking publication of related book manuscripts.Undoing Conquest: Ancient Israel, the Bible, and the Future of Christianity Hidden Histories: Faith and Black Lesbian Leadership A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism: Doing Feminist Ethics Transnationally Women Advancing Knowledge Equity: The Parliament of the World's Religions Feminist Theology and Social Justice in Islam: A Study on the Sermon of Fatima Religion and Intersex: Perspectives from Science, Law, Culture, and Theology
This meeting is for members of the status of women and gender-minoritized persons in the profession committee. The committee has been recommending policies and good practices to assure the full access and academic freedom of women and gender minoritized persons within the Academy and develops programs to enhance their status in the profession. For information on how to get involved with this committee or programs, including women’s mentoring lunch, organized by the committee, please reach out to committee chair, K. Christine Pae at paec@denison.edu .
All are welcome to explore the professional development of career and life paths in various religious fields of scholarship. Panelists will address challenges and successes within their own career paths. Experiences and tools will be shared how they have used their degrees for sustained financial growth and cultural influence even if not on the tenure path. Panelists represent traditional rank and tenure, careers in academic related fields such as archivists and independent scholarship, artificial intelligence in scholarship, and consulting in the non-profit and for-profit world. There will be allotted time for questions and discussion.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century poor colonial conditions led Muslims to theorize their own decline and subsequently, antidotes to this perceived decline, including notions of pan-Islamic solidarity and the invocation of an imagined Muslim world, a world beyond the borders and dictates of nation-states. Islamic revival movements flourished in this period, as Muslims used Islam to articulate resistance to systems of domination, from British colonial rule in India, to Jim Crow in the United States. Together these papers present a complex portrait of Islamic twentieth century revival movements, which were both intensely local in their stakes and articulation, but also connected to larger global networks and trends. The twentieth century was a time of vast diversity in Islamic theological expression. At the same time as these distinct movements proliferated, appeals to an imagined, unified Muslim world and an idealized, all-encompassing Muslim identity increased.
Borders and boundaries are essential mechanisms through which our social world is constituted. The papers in this panel contribute to a robust theorization of borders and boundaries in Islamic studies, through an array of rich and multi-layered case-studies exploring a complex intersection of boundaries: from the cosmological (boundaries between this world and the next, the living and the dead) to geographic and political boundaries of space (national and civilizational borders), as well as boundaries of religious and sectarian lines, gendered and sexual difference, and conceptual categories such as the religious and secular.
Islamic studies grad students will present and respond to each other's dissertation research.
Digital humanities is playing an increasingly important role in religious studies. This panel advances this methodological agenda in Islamic studies in particular, by helping us envision possibilities of how new media and computer-based technologies can be understood and utilized in the field. The papers theorize new media in insightful ways, model novel methodologies in the study of Muslim communities and traditions, and reflect on the use of digital tools in our pedagogy and scholarship.
This roundtable introduces three brand new studies of contemporary Islam, from Egypt, France, and Tanzania, all published in 2024 or early 2025. The three authors will be in dialogue with one another, as well as with two respondents, themselves ethnographers of Islam who work in different regions. The works offer fresh understandings of contested Muslim social and political organizing, while remaining attentive to how Muslims navigate issues of identity, community formation and preservation, and relations with states and wider society. Each book draws on historical materials and rich qualitative research to explore complex dynamics of Islamic education, culture, and community politics. The authors and respondents will engage in a lively conversation that draws together regions of the world too rarely put into conversation. The roundtable format promises a refreshing structure for creative collaboration, introducing cutting-edge work in Islamic studies that will shape emerging directions in contemporary global Islam.
Building on the work of scholars such as Eaton and Ernst, recent scholarship in South Asian Islam has begun to call for the retrieval of insider and ‘emic’ perspectives from Indic texts and traditions (Nair 2020). This panel aims to carry this agenda further, reimagining non-modern objects of academic inquiry as sources of theory, hermeneutics, and philosophy. Attending to the creative and interpretive practices in historical texts allows us to study the Indic Islamicate on its own terms. Beginning in the thirteenth century Delhi Sultanate, Ilma's contribution takes Khusraw seriously as a theorist, reading him as a source of emic methods of evaluating Indo-Persian literary works. Raihan's work on the sixteenth century Konkanī figure al-Mahāʾimī invites us to reconfigure our concepts of reading and interpretive practice. Further South still, Mackenzie’s examination of vernacular hagiography, and emic historiography of religious syncretism, enriches our comprehension of cultural exchange. Turning toward the Mughal era, Aman's paper invites us to reconsider the motivations of Hindu-Muslim encounters, with an eye toward understanding the crucial role played by Indic and Islamicate philosophical systems in constructing a reading of the (religious) ‘other.’ Glistening like a pearl: Exploring Indo-Persian Literary Hermeneutics through Khusraw’s Dibāchāh.
The last few years have yielded a body of work in Jewish and Christian thought calling for a (re)turn to the maternal as a rich but marginalized source for thinking about these traditions’ central philosophical, theological, and ethical preoccupations, including obligation, love, vulnerability, embodiment, and care. While this panel shares concern for exclusion and inattention to questions of care, domesticity, vulnerability, and embodiment, it details the ways that the unacknowledged normative starting point informing much of this work, in which maternality is a privileged, paradigmatic lens, precludes the realization of this scholarships' stated goals of challenging dominant categories structuring collective life through the consideration of minoritized subject positions. This panel poses a series of methodological critiques that refigure the possibilities and limits of thinking with “the maternal turn.”
This book panel engages Rafael Rachel Neis’ innovative book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven . This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis, Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between humans and other beings, even as they were intent on classifying creatures and tracing the contours of what it means to be human. Recognizing that life proliferates by mechanisms beyond sexual copulation between two heterosexual “male” and “female” individuals of the same species, the rabbis proposed intricate alternatives. In parsing a variety of creatures, they upset unmitigated claims of human distinctiveness. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven enters conversations in animal studies, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist science studies to provincialize sacrosanct ideals of reproduction; the book thereby offers powerful historical alternatives to the paradigms associated with so-called traditional ideas
Henry Bial, in Acting Jewish, describes “double coding” as “the specific means and mechanisms by which a performance can communicate one message to Jewish audiences while simultaneously communicating another, often contradictory message to gentile audiences.” Such double coding is in play with what these panelists term “Implicit Judaism,” referring to the subtle ways in which Jewish identity, culture, and practices are embedded within various aspects of everyday life, often without explicit religious markers. These aspects include food choices, popular culture references, and the presentation of American Jews in post-WWII popular literature. This roundtable aims to challenge religious/secular divisions by exploring the ways in which implicit Judaism operates as a form of gatekeeping around Jewish identity. This gatekeeping not only creates its own particular cultural identity—it also alienates those on the margins of the Jewish community who might not know the codes.
This panel investigates multiple sites of meaning-making in Jewish thought, politics, and culture, from rituals and ceremonies in late antiquity to modern mystical discourses. The first paper views rabbinic literature within the context of late antique Greco-Roman medicine to ask how we might apply the “bio-looping” model of therapeutic intervention to rabbinic conceptions of embodiment. The second paper attends to midrash as an expressive practice of speech that affectively forms both public rhetorical culture and the individual political subjects within it. The third paper addresses medieval kabbalistic approaches to historical misfortune as cosmological attempts to position Jews as proactive agents of world-historical events. The fourth paper views the politics of mysticism through the lens of Jewish cultural history to consider the complexities of modern liberal political discourses. Taken together, these papers illuminate Jewish textual, affective, and political entanglements in order to shed new light on existing cultural and religious categories.
