In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper examines the emergence and impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) fatwa generators, also known as fatwa engines, in and on contemporary Islamic belief and practice. It contributes to the arena of digital humanities due to its use of humanistic research into digital objects and culture, and to the field of digital Islam by offering a survey and analysis of these fatwa-generating applications. It uses small-scale data mining as well as visual and textual content analysis to understand the characteristics of these fatwa generators, and draws upon relevant literature in both fields in its analysis. It argues that the disclaimers offered by each application reveal a reticence to fully blur the historical distinctions between fatwas as authoritative, actionable jurisprudence and all other religious advice, no matter how well intended or grounded in scripture.

This paper examines the challenges and stakes of American Sign Language translation among Deaf Muslims. Drawing on the public archives of Global Deaf Muslim (GDM), a Washington, D.C.-based educational and advocacy organization, the paper considers such translational work within a broader ethic of ta'arruf, which rejects deficiency-driven concepts of deafness in favor of one that incorporates Deafness within Islam's overall cultural, linguistic, ethnic diversity. What are the stakes of "thinking" Deafness this way, and what are the technologies and translational techniques required to carry out this work? Examining GDM's video translations of Qur'anic verses into ASL, as well as interpretation techniques in other educational materials, I demonstrate how the semantic and sensory challenges of this work also implicate theological problems of divine "voicing." I argue that by meeting such challenges, GDM interpreters are “deafening” their faith, defining it in ways that enrich its ethics of ta‘arruf through Deaf epistemologies.

The Mega Masjid is both a physical space and an institutional variety. It boasts key features of Sunni masajid, producing a sense of universality while iteratively reimagining the American Masjid as a location of placemaking and cultural innovation. This paper explores how the Mega Masjid responds to and adopts features of American Protestant congregationalism to produce a unique and culturally salient masjid model. Through a comparative analysis of the Mega Church, the Mega Masjid emerges as more than a product of Protestant Hegemony, but rather a space aimed at meeting the ever-evolving spiritual and material demands of an American Muslim future. It is designed and redesigned to serve as an oasis retreat for American Muslims, a break from the aggressive heat of protestant hegemony, secularist pressures, and anti-Muslim racism. A ‘one-stop-shop’ for the American Muslim Family, Mega Masjids reimagine and redefine masjid space, programming and amenities beyond traditional ritual worship.

This paper retrieves the Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation, as developed by Augustine and Aquinas, arguing that their accounts of the fulfilment of creatures in contemplative ascent offers a constructive alternative to impasses in contemporary models of eschatology. Augustine inteprets the creature’s longing for beatitude through a participatory ontology shaped by his Plotinian inheritance, in which all beings proceed from and return to a transcendent source. Aquinas extends this trajectory, integrating Dionysian elements within his account of creation to produce a metaphysics in which creaturely being remains ultimately ordered towards its source. Together these accounts offers a profoundly Platonic vision of participatory being which resists naturalistic eschatology or the collapse of the distinction of creatures from the Creator. Their synthesis illuminates the metaphysical depths and theological fecundity of creaturely dependence, ascent, and contemplation in ways that contemporary eschatologies–shorn of these resources–struggle to do.

This paper unveils a Neoplatonic grammar of “energy” (energeia) in Richard Hooker’s (1554–1600) account of humanity’s creative “participation” in God. His articulation of a “sacramental poetics” in his Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie has drawn attention from scholars aiming to re-enchant the post-Enlightenment world. They often read Hooker as supporting a participatory metaphysics grounded in Christian panentheism. This paper argues instead that Hooker retrieves from church fathers like Dionysius and Damascene a Neoplatonic tradition that connects the Aristotelian language of energeia with human acts of divine participation. I demonstrate this through his participative use of terms like “working” in Book One of the Lawes in relation to human acts of poesis, and then in Book Five in relation to Christ’s sacramental presence. I argue that “energy” operates as a mediating category in his thought, allowing Hooker to articulate a participatory ontology that avoids both panentheism and undue metaphysical complexity.

Plato’s Timaeus makes the cosmos intelligible by positing a world soul: a mediating intelligence that binds the visible world to intelligible order and renders it a living whole. This paper takes that account as a conceptual baseline and reads the Gospel of John in its light. This paper does not argue that John depends on Plato. This paper argues that John addresses a comparable problem—how cosmic order and knowability relate to divine agency—while refusing a key Platonic solution. In the Timaeus, intelligibility is secured by an immanent cosmic soul. In John, the work of mediation and disclosure is assigned to the Logos (and, secondarily, to the Spirit) within a doctrine of creation. The comparison clarifies what the world soul contributes in the Platonic tradition and what changes when mediation is relocated from the cosmos to the divine Word.

Henry More’s Spirit of Nature, or hylarchic principle, is well-known as one of the signature doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists by means of which they navigated between materialist atheism and hylozoic pantheism. Anne Conway’s Middle Nature occupies a similar position as it mediates between God and creatures, but it operates within a seemingly quite different, less dualist and more gradualist metaphysics. The relationship between the two, and to the deeply Plotinian panentheism of More’s early poetry, is a complex one. This paper will re-examine this relationship, arguing that Conway’s gradualist metaphysics, devised in part to overcome the difficulties of More’s dualism, approximates the metaphysics of his poetry, and there is evidence that More too, late in his career, inclined hestiantly back toward his earlier positions. Conway emerges not so much as departing from More as completing her teacher’s original system more thoroughly than he himself was able to achieve.

This paper examines the figure of the Indian yogi in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century within the intertwined histories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology. In Western scientific and popular media, Indian yogis and fakirs were repeatedly represented as “mesmerists” (c. 1830-1860s) and later “hypnotists” (c. 1880-1920s), masters of attention and suggestion at a time when science and technology were increasingly revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the mind and will. This paper shows how the extraordinary figure of the yogi was interpreted through the new categories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology, and how the modern Western mind (and self) was understood and enacted through engagement with the yogi.  Through the yogi, Western audiences both explored and distanced themselves from the unsettling possibility that the mind is more permeable, the self more suggestible, and the will more limited than the dominant ideal of the rational, self-transparent liberal subject would admit.

This paper analyses a modern genealogy of the fearful constructions of the figure of the yogi by tracing a history of the discourses of hypnotism, brainwashing, and coercive control. It begins with a broad interrogation into how liberal fears of perceived threats to individual autonomy circulate in the United States and India. The author shows how the United States has surveilled the yogi/guru’s powers of mind control, while in Indian electoral politics they are instrumentalized. This paper concludes with the case study of a very real psychosis of an Indian businesswoman who believes herself to be “under attack” from a nefarious yogi/guru who is engaging in “black magic,” showing the intimate impact of such fearful discourses. Drawing on queer theorists who interrogate the affective impacts of fearful discourses, this paper reveals the consequences of the constructed fear of the “dangerous” yogi/guru.

There is a curious trend that appears in the teachings of several prominent twentieth-century gurus: samskaras, or mental dispositions born of accrued from the imprints of past action (karma), are increasingly articulated as residing in the energy wheels (cakras) or subtle channels (nadis) of the visionary yogic body. This is hardly out of step with modern wellness culture, which has long embraced the idea that “the body keeps the score.” But it is fairly unprecedented in pre-modern South Asian sources where such concepts generally represent two parallel, if not directly competing, models. This paper examines the key moments of innovation and synthesis in both South Asian and Euro-American sources that yielded this trend, paying especially close attention to conceptual overlap between the evolving models of Kundalini and the unconscious.

Based on ethnographic “fieldwork” conducted during a 75-hour online course on Indian, or “Vedic” astrology (also called jyotish), this paper explores how astrological thinking among yoga practitioners serves as a contemporary diagnostic language of the self, and notably a hybrid form in which jyotish is refracted through twentieth-century psychological astrology. Rather than relying on the predictive possibilities of a classically-Indic astrology, the version of jyotish taught in this course posits a Jung-inspired worldview where cosmic forces are not agents of change but archetypal energies to be adjusted, strengthened, or stirred. Here, I trace the contours of this hybridized psychological astrology–part Indian, part Jungian, and entirely compatible with the ethos of interiority and self-care that dominates the discourse of the global yoga industry. 

This paper examines the figure of the Indian yogi in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century within the intertwined histories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology. In Western scientific and popular media, Indian yogis and fakirs were repeatedly represented as “mesmerists” (c. 1830-1860s) and later “hypnotists” (c. 1880-1920s), masters of attention and suggestion at a time when science and technology were increasingly revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the mind and will. This paper shows how the extraordinary figure of the yogi was interpreted through the new categories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology, and how the modern Western mind (and self) was understood and enacted through engagement with the yogi.  Through the yogi, Western audiences both explored and distanced themselves from the unsettling possibility that the mind is more permeable, the self more suggestible, and the will more limited than the dominant ideal of the rational, self-transparent liberal subject would admit.

This paper analyses a modern genealogy of the fearful constructions of the figure of the yogi by tracing a history of the discourses of hypnotism, brainwashing, and coercive control. It begins with a broad interrogation into how liberal fears of perceived threats to individual autonomy circulate in the United States and India. The author shows how the United States has surveilled the yogi/guru’s powers of mind control, while in Indian electoral politics they are instrumentalized. This paper concludes with the case study of a very real psychosis of an Indian businesswoman who believes herself to be “under attack” from a nefarious yogi/guru who is engaging in “black magic,” showing the intimate impact of such fearful discourses. Drawing on queer theorists who interrogate the affective impacts of fearful discourses, this paper reveals the consequences of the constructed fear of the “dangerous” yogi/guru.

There is a curious trend that appears in the teachings of several prominent twentieth-century gurus: samskaras, or mental dispositions born of accrued from the imprints of past action (karma), are increasingly articulated as residing in the energy wheels (cakras) or subtle channels (nadis) of the visionary yogic body. This is hardly out of step with modern wellness culture, which has long embraced the idea that “the body keeps the score.” But it is fairly unprecedented in pre-modern South Asian sources where such concepts generally represent two parallel, if not directly competing, models. This paper examines the key moments of innovation and synthesis in both South Asian and Euro-American sources that yielded this trend, paying especially close attention to conceptual overlap between the evolving models of Kundalini and the unconscious.

Based on ethnographic “fieldwork” conducted during a 75-hour online course on Indian, or “Vedic” astrology (also called jyotish), this paper explores how astrological thinking among yoga practitioners serves as a contemporary diagnostic language of the self, and notably a hybrid form in which jyotish is refracted through twentieth-century psychological astrology. Rather than relying on the predictive possibilities of a classically-Indic astrology, the version of jyotish taught in this course posits a Jung-inspired worldview where cosmic forces are not agents of change but archetypal energies to be adjusted, strengthened, or stirred. Here, I trace the contours of this hybridized psychological astrology–part Indian, part Jungian, and entirely compatible with the ethos of interiority and self-care that dominates the discourse of the global yoga industry. 

This paper examines the figure of the Indian yogi in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century within the intertwined histories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology. In Western scientific and popular media, Indian yogis and fakirs were repeatedly represented as “mesmerists” (c. 1830-1860s) and later “hypnotists” (c. 1880-1920s), masters of attention and suggestion at a time when science and technology were increasingly revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the mind and will. This paper shows how the extraordinary figure of the yogi was interpreted through the new categories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology, and how the modern Western mind (and self) was understood and enacted through engagement with the yogi.  Through the yogi, Western audiences both explored and distanced themselves from the unsettling possibility that the mind is more permeable, the self more suggestible, and the will more limited than the dominant ideal of the rational, self-transparent liberal subject would admit.

This paper analyses a modern genealogy of the fearful constructions of the figure of the yogi by tracing a history of the discourses of hypnotism, brainwashing, and coercive control. It begins with a broad interrogation into how liberal fears of perceived threats to individual autonomy circulate in the United States and India. The author shows how the United States has surveilled the yogi/guru’s powers of mind control, while in Indian electoral politics they are instrumentalized. This paper concludes with the case study of a very real psychosis of an Indian businesswoman who believes herself to be “under attack” from a nefarious yogi/guru who is engaging in “black magic,” showing the intimate impact of such fearful discourses. Drawing on queer theorists who interrogate the affective impacts of fearful discourses, this paper reveals the consequences of the constructed fear of the “dangerous” yogi/guru.

There is a curious trend that appears in the teachings of several prominent twentieth-century gurus: samskaras, or mental dispositions born of accrued from the imprints of past action (karma), are increasingly articulated as residing in the energy wheels (cakras) or subtle channels (nadis) of the visionary yogic body. This is hardly out of step with modern wellness culture, which has long embraced the idea that “the body keeps the score.” But it is fairly unprecedented in pre-modern South Asian sources where such concepts generally represent two parallel, if not directly competing, models. This paper examines the key moments of innovation and synthesis in both South Asian and Euro-American sources that yielded this trend, paying especially close attention to conceptual overlap between the evolving models of Kundalini and the unconscious.

Based on ethnographic “fieldwork” conducted during a 75-hour online course on Indian, or “Vedic” astrology (also called jyotish), this paper explores how astrological thinking among yoga practitioners serves as a contemporary diagnostic language of the self, and notably a hybrid form in which jyotish is refracted through twentieth-century psychological astrology. Rather than relying on the predictive possibilities of a classically-Indic astrology, the version of jyotish taught in this course posits a Jung-inspired worldview where cosmic forces are not agents of change but archetypal energies to be adjusted, strengthened, or stirred. Here, I trace the contours of this hybridized psychological astrology–part Indian, part Jungian, and entirely compatible with the ethos of interiority and self-care that dominates the discourse of the global yoga industry. 

The paper explores the relationship between language and world through the investigation of Zhuangzi's analysis of "indicators" (指) and in dialogue with two Indian frameworks: the Madhyamaka tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi) and the Jain seven-fold reasoning (saptabhaṅgī). Drawing on Kripkean semantics, the paper argues that thinkers across these traditions deploy modal arguments to grapple with the indeterminacy of language and reference.

The Zhuangzi radicalizes Gongsun Longzi's nominalism, in which indicators are ontologically distinguished from real things, and then applies the same logic against things themselves: if indicators cannot be indicated, referents are equally unstable. I argue that this indeterminacy structurally encompasses both Nāgārjuna's denialism and Malliṣeṇa's pluralism. Rather than choosing between them, the Zhuangzi holds both: a horse both is and is not a horse, and is neither a horse nor not a horse, depending on a perspective. Indeterminacy, on this reading, is not a failure of language but its feature.

My point of departure is the congruity of Jaina and Daoist perspectivalism. Jain philosophers hold that reality is non-one-sided (anekānta): any object of knowledge is knowable from infinite variety of viewpoints (nayas), and that no statement can provide an exhaustive account of a thing. All epistemic expressions implicitly reference one aspect (deśa) of a thing, rather than its totality.

These assumptions share remarkable similarities with Zhuangzi's “The sorting which evens things out” (Qiwulun). Like the Jain philosopher Samantabhadra, Zhuangzi saw knowledge as perspectival, that statements which express determinate knowledge are parameterized by viewpoints, and that uncareful combativeness in philosophical discourse is a major problem which should be assuaged through context-sensitivity and some way of embracing seemingly contradictory views. The paper draws these connections and explores how normative accounts of language-use in Jaina and Daoist traditions may be construed as mutually informative approaches to framing the soteriological value of dynamic perspective-shifting.

Scholars have argued that Zhuangzi's embodied form of epistemic perspectivism, which brings together contrary perspectives to form more inclusive “higher” perspectives (“larger knowledge” (大知). In this, the Zhuangzi shares remarkable similarities with the perspectivism (nayavāda) of Jaina philosophers, in which opposing perspectives are unified through a process of contextualization (syādvāda). However, Jaina philosophers ground this perspectivism on a realist objective standard. Unlike Zhuangzian perspectivism, this synchronizing perspectives depend on an objective standard for veridicality. However, the Zhaungzi rejects any such standard. Within the Zhuangzi, the world and ourselves are in a constant state of flux. Hence, any objective standard cannot be predetermined and cannot last. I argue that the Zhuangzi takes all perspectives to depend on one’s changing socio-physical embodiment, in which veridicality is determined by temporary usefulness, in contrast to the Jaina objective standard. 

The paper explores the relationship between language and world through the investigation of Zhuangzi's analysis of "indicators" (指) and in dialogue with two Indian frameworks: the Madhyamaka tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi) and the Jain seven-fold reasoning (saptabhaṅgī). Drawing on Kripkean semantics, the paper argues that thinkers across these traditions deploy modal arguments to grapple with the indeterminacy of language and reference.

The Zhuangzi radicalizes Gongsun Longzi's nominalism, in which indicators are ontologically distinguished from real things, and then applies the same logic against things themselves: if indicators cannot be indicated, referents are equally unstable. I argue that this indeterminacy structurally encompasses both Nāgārjuna's denialism and Malliṣeṇa's pluralism. Rather than choosing between them, the Zhuangzi holds both: a horse both is and is not a horse, and is neither a horse nor not a horse, depending on a perspective. Indeterminacy, on this reading, is not a failure of language but its feature.

My point of departure is the congruity of Jaina and Daoist perspectivalism. Jain philosophers hold that reality is non-one-sided (anekānta): any object of knowledge is knowable from infinite variety of viewpoints (nayas), and that no statement can provide an exhaustive account of a thing. All epistemic expressions implicitly reference one aspect (deśa) of a thing, rather than its totality.

These assumptions share remarkable similarities with Zhuangzi's “The sorting which evens things out” (Qiwulun). Like the Jain philosopher Samantabhadra, Zhuangzi saw knowledge as perspectival, that statements which express determinate knowledge are parameterized by viewpoints, and that uncareful combativeness in philosophical discourse is a major problem which should be assuaged through context-sensitivity and some way of embracing seemingly contradictory views. The paper draws these connections and explores how normative accounts of language-use in Jaina and Daoist traditions may be construed as mutually informative approaches to framing the soteriological value of dynamic perspective-shifting.

Scholars have argued that Zhuangzi's embodied form of epistemic perspectivism, which brings together contrary perspectives to form more inclusive “higher” perspectives (“larger knowledge” (大知). In this, the Zhuangzi shares remarkable similarities with the perspectivism (nayavāda) of Jaina philosophers, in which opposing perspectives are unified through a process of contextualization (syādvāda). However, Jaina philosophers ground this perspectivism on a realist objective standard. Unlike Zhuangzian perspectivism, this synchronizing perspectives depend on an objective standard for veridicality. However, the Zhaungzi rejects any such standard. Within the Zhuangzi, the world and ourselves are in a constant state of flux. Hence, any objective standard cannot be predetermined and cannot last. I argue that the Zhuangzi takes all perspectives to depend on one’s changing socio-physical embodiment, in which veridicality is determined by temporary usefulness, in contrast to the Jaina objective standard. 

The paper explores the relationship between language and world through the investigation of Zhuangzi's analysis of "indicators" (指) and in dialogue with two Indian frameworks: the Madhyamaka tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi) and the Jain seven-fold reasoning (saptabhaṅgī). Drawing on Kripkean semantics, the paper argues that thinkers across these traditions deploy modal arguments to grapple with the indeterminacy of language and reference.

The Zhuangzi radicalizes Gongsun Longzi's nominalism, in which indicators are ontologically distinguished from real things, and then applies the same logic against things themselves: if indicators cannot be indicated, referents are equally unstable. I argue that this indeterminacy structurally encompasses both Nāgārjuna's denialism and Malliṣeṇa's pluralism. Rather than choosing between them, the Zhuangzi holds both: a horse both is and is not a horse, and is neither a horse nor not a horse, depending on a perspective. Indeterminacy, on this reading, is not a failure of language but its feature.

My point of departure is the congruity of Jaina and Daoist perspectivalism. Jain philosophers hold that reality is non-one-sided (anekānta): any object of knowledge is knowable from infinite variety of viewpoints (nayas), and that no statement can provide an exhaustive account of a thing. All epistemic expressions implicitly reference one aspect (deśa) of a thing, rather than its totality.

These assumptions share remarkable similarities with Zhuangzi's “The sorting which evens things out” (Qiwulun). Like the Jain philosopher Samantabhadra, Zhuangzi saw knowledge as perspectival, that statements which express determinate knowledge are parameterized by viewpoints, and that uncareful combativeness in philosophical discourse is a major problem which should be assuaged through context-sensitivity and some way of embracing seemingly contradictory views. The paper draws these connections and explores how normative accounts of language-use in Jaina and Daoist traditions may be construed as mutually informative approaches to framing the soteriological value of dynamic perspective-shifting.

Scholars have argued that Zhuangzi's embodied form of epistemic perspectivism, which brings together contrary perspectives to form more inclusive “higher” perspectives (“larger knowledge” (大知). In this, the Zhuangzi shares remarkable similarities with the perspectivism (nayavāda) of Jaina philosophers, in which opposing perspectives are unified through a process of contextualization (syādvāda). However, Jaina philosophers ground this perspectivism on a realist objective standard. Unlike Zhuangzian perspectivism, this synchronizing perspectives depend on an objective standard for veridicality. However, the Zhaungzi rejects any such standard. Within the Zhuangzi, the world and ourselves are in a constant state of flux. Hence, any objective standard cannot be predetermined and cannot last. I argue that the Zhuangzi takes all perspectives to depend on one’s changing socio-physical embodiment, in which veridicality is determined by temporary usefulness, in contrast to the Jaina objective standard.