In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

While scholars have recognized the ubiquity of erotic and homoerotic themes in classical Islamic literatures, they have neglected an important historical question: How did specific communities of early modern Muslims engage with classical texts featuring erotic themes? My paper addresses this question by analyzing early modern Indian commentaries on the Gulistan (Rose-Garden). I argue that the production, circulation, and materiality of these manuscript commentaries reveals the influence of the Gulistan in the everyday cultivation of Islamic ethics, beyond the royal courts that are the loci of existing studies. Commentators approached the Gulistan through a paradigm I call the “ethics of erotics.” Experiencing and discussing different forms of desire, including same-sex desire, was part of this framework, but acting upon them was not. In this gap between desire, language, and action lay the possibility of ethical cultivation.

This paper presents a novel analysis of khunthās (intersex individuals) as a third ontological category in certain classical Māliki and Shiʿi legal discourses. While intersex individuals are sometimes seen as a third legal or social category in Muslim contexts, no studies have demonstrated that they were recognised as such ontologically. Adopting historical, textual, and legal-hermeneutical approaches, I examine several classical Māliki and Shiʿi legal texts spanning the 11th to the 16th centuries. I argue that some of these jurists challenged the binary interpretation of sex, advocating for an alternative exegesis that accommodates khunthā as an ontological third category. To highlight the implications of this approach, I contrast the non-binary perspective with binary interpretations in legal cases of marriage, clothing, inheritance, and prayer. This analysis reveals the differing legal rights assigned to khunthās, offering a historical foundation for contemporary Muslim intersex individuals to advocate for their civil rights within their societies.

This paper examines classical Shāfi‘ī opinions regarding the khunthā as represented in Abū Ibrāhīm Ismā‘īl bin Yaḥyā al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar of al-Shāfi‘ī’s al-Umm (Dar al-Sha‘b, 1968, 6 vols.) and contextualizes them within a history of legal discussions of non-binary bodies. While al-Shāfi‘ī (d. 820) and al-Muzanī (d. 877) prepared legal arguments that recognized a legal category that straddled the gender binary between male and female, they did not employ this legal category to recognize an ontological being other than male or female. They recognized the khunthā as a person whose genital variations made them difficult to categorize legally as male or female but employed the juristic concept of certainty to evade the difference between the social reality of non-binary bodies and Qur'an texts that spoke only of male and female created beings.

Current trends in feminist Muslim scholarship highlight radical uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity as fruitful ground for theological reflection and Islamic ethics. But what do uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity look like in practice? How is uncertainty lived and felt, and how might it be a foundation for Muslim piety? Playful Piety: How American Muslims Play with/in Islam explores how contemporary American Muslims cultivate pious subjectivities through various forms of playfulness, and how tradition and authority are negotiated in these processes. I suggest that playing could be the praxis for a feminist theology of uncertainty. My present case study explores how a queer Muslim devotional circle “plays with tradition.” Through analysis of my ethnographic data I argue that playing is a legitimate form of Muslim piety and offers novel epistemological and theological approaches to tradition, especially for marginalized Muslims. 

Mysticism is often associated with inner liberation from the prison of the confined self into union with the Divine. But how does that liberation work in times of political persecution and repressive authority? This paper explores this question by focusing on two Eastern Orthodox mystics, St. Matrona (d. 1952) and starets (elder) Nikolai Guryanov (d. 2002), who operated in the aggressively modernizing, scientized and anti-religious, context of 20th century Soviet Russia. Drawing on content analysis of their biographies and the concept of “mystical consciousness,” this paper unpacks the patterns by which St Matrona and Father Nikolai dealt with Soviet authorities to continue their trajectories of liberation. These include being “lost” in a city or a small island, acting as (holy) fools, using mystical visions and prayers, and relying on as well as liberating others. These can be seen as elements of a mystical consciousness they cultivated in themselves and others.

The Cambridge-educated Indian nationalist and mystic Aurobindo Ghose, later Sri Aurobindo, was heavily involved throughout his life in the cause of Indian independence from British colonial rule. Early on, this took the form of impassioned literary argument in the pages of self-published periodicals like Bande Mataram and the Karmayogin, where he couched his political arguments in the language of Indian spiritual and cultural renewal. Following several pivotal mystical experiences, his attention shifted toward his own yogic practice, framed by an evolutionary esotericist metaphysics of cosmic transformation into divinity. He understood Indian independence, and, during WWII, the victory of the Allied forces, as key developments in this process, and focused his own mystical practice on achieving these ends. From his meditative perch in Pondicherry, India, Aurobindo and his partner, Mirra Alfassa, engaged in psychic battle against the Axis forces and worked to influence the “play of forces” supportive of Indian independence. 

This paper examines the mystical dimensions of Nancy Eiesland’s The Disabled God, positioning her as both a revolutionary and a traditional mystic deeply influenced by Latin American liberation theology. While mysticism is often characterized by solitary, direct communion with the divine, liberation theologians have redefined it as an experience of God within the context of communal commitment and social transformation. Eiesland’s work embodies this integration, demonstrating that her mystical engagement is not separate from her political activism but is, in fact, deeply intertwined with it. By drawing on liberation theology, this paper situates The Disabled God within a mystical tradition that challenges power from the margins and offers alternative ways of perceiving and relating to the divine.

For many Americans, a world without prisons cannot be fathomed. Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd have argued that punishment has been almost inextricably tied to justice in our collective imagination, making it hard to comprehend a justice system that is rooted in anything other than punitive measures (Dubler & Lloyd 2020). I believe this has a deeper effect on American consciousness around abolition – because the carceral logic is so deeply imbedded, abolitionist discourses seem illogical and therefore inconceivable to many. 

In this presentation, I argue that prison abolition movements can gain much from using mystical modes of rhetoric to allow readers to imagine the world anew. While respecting the rational, clear-sighted moral arguments for abolition from Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore Wilson, Mariame Kaba, and others, I follow Malcolm X’s directive to achieve liberation “by any means necessary” and present a new mode of communication to the abolitionist discourse: the mystical.

“Were the Spirits Silent or Silenced?” argues for the return of the spirits to the study of Black Spiritualism. It proposes that secular progress narratives (which emphasize political liberation above other spiritual outcomes) have so dominated the field of Religious Studies that studies of Black Spiritualism are bereft of the spirits themselves. This analysis of extant literature recontextualizes and retheorizes the current relationship of the field to the gods, the spirits, and other more-than-human entities. Religion, particularly Black Spiritualism, can be about power while also not necessarily being about empowerment. It is about the power to heal (or to harm) and the power to communicate with those that have passed on. It is rarely about personal empowerment or an exercise in someone “finding their voice.” This paper explores the methodological implications of recognizing our “braided-ness” with the more-than-human while envisioning a future for the study of spirits.

The rise of plant intelligence is both an epistemic and ethical event, revealing the contradictions of an age that has wielded knowledge in pursuit of mastery over nature—only to find that human mastery now demands its own undoing. Prominent botanists argue that recognizing plant intelligence requires reforming the scientific method, surpassing its limits to grasp cognition beyond the human. But this assumes that knowledge takes root in an antecedent ground revealed once we get our methods right. Drawing on pragmatist readings of Hegel, I argue that knowledge is instead rooted in the shifting criteria of historical authority, which change as thought’s boundaries are redrawn. Thought takes root not in fixed foundations, in other words, but in justification’s provisional grounds. The recent emergence of plant intelligence thus marks not just an expansion of knowledge but a reckoning with human mastery as the criteria justifying our domination of nature shift beneath us. 

Situating human freedom and agency within the context of more-than-human forms of freedom and agency can correct false understandings of freedom as independence. The possibility of complex forms of freedom is predicated on the prior existence of simpler forms of freedom and carry with them heightened modes of interdependence and vulnerability.  Recognition of the dialectic of freedom and dependency can correct human exceptionalism without obscuring the distinctive forms of freedom and agency that are possible for language-using animals.  This paper develops such an account in dialogue with the philosophical anthropology of Helmut Plessner, Hans Jonas’s notion of “needful freedom,” and contemporary philosopher of biology Evan Thompson’s understanding of the autopoietic character of living organisms in constant exchange with their surroundings. 

The underworld, as a mythical space in western culture, has often been associated with fear, horror, or damnation. It hasn’t typically been a space of desire: it’s not the sort of place that people dream of ending up. And yet, something has been changing in the underworld. The work of scientists—ecologists, foresters, mycologists—is revealing an underworld that is more alive, and more life-giving, than the underworld of western histories. Is this new underworld becoming a zone of salvation, rather than damnation? Or is the chill of horror in the underworld something we just can’t shake? This paper offers an experiment in plant, and fungal, thinking in order to explore—in conversation with roots, dirt, and mycorrhizal networks—the intimacies between life and death, beauty and horror, or possibility and closure that underworlds may have always (and may continue) to confront us with. 

At the margins of Islamic orthodoxy in the 9th century, an esoteric philosophical society, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ (Brethren of Purity), engaged the public in a utopian and equitable vision of collective life. Within their renowned encyclopedic treatise, Epistle 22: The Case of the Animals versus Man occupies a special place. This paper identifies three registers of critique within the animals’ grievances and humanity’s defense of its assumed superiority: anthropocentrism, logocentrism, and ethnocentrism. By integrating these critiques with the Quranic notions of Mīzān (balance), Khalīfah (lieutenancy), and Amānah (trust), this paper explores how this allegorical fable reveals the link between ecological injustices and unjust social imaginaries. The successors of the Ikhwān, the contemporary Ismailis, have continued this tradition of environmental stewardship. This paper maps the shared moral imperatives espoused by the Brethren onto the mission of the Aga Khan Development Network, an institution that has mobilized global efforts against climate crises.

This presentation seeks to extrapolate data and trends relating to the esoteric book trade in Britain during the latter half of the Twentieth Century via a close examination of the notebooks of Doreen Valiente. The data presented can shed light on esoteric bookselling in general as well as on the early development of Wicca more specifically, considering Valiente's important contributions to the religion during its first decades. The notebooks reveal what books Valiente sought and purchased, the bookshops she frequented in Brighton, London and Glastonbury, and even – on occasion – the topics of the conversations and gossip she exchanged with or about the proprietors. An analysis of this data – as well as supporting materials in the form of letters to/from relevant booksellers – can serve to illustrate the role of the esoteric bookshop in the production and distribution of 'Rejected Knowledge' within the occult – and more specifically, Wiccan – milieus during the period.

Appalachia has struggled under a spell of disenchantment cast by books such as J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. New works of speculative fiction resist this critique by social elites, re-enchanting Appalachian landscapes and people through Pagan themes of nature spirituality, fey beings, and magic. We will look at two novels and a serialized horror podcast to examine the important role of speculative fiction in re-enchanting both landscape and regional identity in a Pagan mode.