Speakers & Participants
Participants will include 10 invited speakers and 19 competitively selected participants drawn from an international Call for Papers. Click on "Conference Details" for information about the discussion panels.
Invited Speakers
Our list of invited speakers includes:
Lila Abu-Lughod, is Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Columbia University. She has published widely on women, gender, and cultural politics in the Middle East. Her first books were based on ethnographic research in Egypt. These include Veiled Sentiments; Writing Women’s Worlds (a 15th anniversary edition of which will be published next year); and Dramas of Nationhood. She has also edited Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, a book on colonial and postcolonial politics. Her most recent book is the co-edited Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. As a Carnegie Scholar, and with support in 2008 from ACLS, she will be working on a book on international discourses on Muslim women’s rights.
Lara Deeb, is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies at the University of California at Irvine. She is the author of An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon (Princeton University Press 2006) as well as of a number of articles on the transformation of Shi‘i religious ritual, Islamic women’s participation in the public sphere, and Hizbullah in Lebanon. She is also a member of the editorial committee for Middle East Report and a founding member of the Radical Arab Women’s Activist Network and the Task Force for Middle East Anthropology. She is currently working on a new project on “interfaith intimacies” in relation to transnational discourses about sexuality and religion as well as an ongoing collaborative field research project on the Islamic cultural sphere in Lebanon.
Lamia Karim, is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon-Eugene. Her research interests are in gender, development, globalization, Islamic nationalism and human rights. Her book manuscript The Political Economy of Shame: Gender, NGOs and Debt in Bangladesh is currently under review. She has published articles on NGOs, gender, globalization and ethnicity in anthropology journals and chapters in edited volumes. Her research on gender, NGOs and globalization has been supported by two postdoctoral grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Fulbright and the Social Science Research Council. Her current research examines the Islamic state and feminist praxis in two Asian Islamic societies, Bangladesh and Malaysia.
Shahnaz Khan, teaches Women’s Studies & Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research interests include the Zina Ordinance in Pakistan and Muslim women in the diaspora. She is the author of “Zina, Transnational Feminism and the Moral Regulation of Pakistani Women” and “Aversion & Desire: negotiating muslim female identity in the diaspora”. She has also published articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Studies and Feminist Review. More recently she has been looking at South Asian cinema.
Tariq Modood, is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. He is a regular contributor to the media and policy debates, was awarded a MBE for services to social sciences and ethnic relations in 2001 and elected a member of the UK Academy of Social Sciences in 2004. His recent publications include Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea, (Polity, 2007); and as co-editor, Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach (Routledge, 2006) and Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship (CUP 2008).
Haideh Moghissi, is a Professor of sociology, in Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies and Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University, Toronto. She was a founder of the Iranian National Union of Women and a member of its first executive and editorial boards, before leaving Iran in 1984. Her publications (in English) include articles in refereed journals and chapters in edited volumes and following books: Muslim Diaspora: Gender, Culture and Identity (ed.) (London: Routledge 2006); Three volume reference, Women and Islam:Critical Concepts in Sociology (ed.) (London: Routledge 2005); Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis, (Zed Press, 1999, winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award) and Populism and Feminism in Iran :Women's Struggle in a Male-Defined Revolutionary Movement (London: Macmillan Press; New York: St.Martin's Press 1994.). Dr. Moghissi has served as Coordinator, Certificate for Anti-Racism Research and Practice (CARRP), Chair of the Executive Committee of Centre for Feminist Research and member of the Executive Committee of Centre for Refugee Studies at York University. Presently, she is the principal researcher in two international comparative research projects, “Diaspora, Islam and Gender” (funded by SSHRCC) and “Muslim diasporas: Heightened Islamic identity, gender, and cultural resistance” (funded by the Ford Foundation).
Norani Othman, is a sociologist, a Professor and Principal Research Fellow of the Institut Kajian Malaysia dan Antarabangsa (Institute of Malaysian and International Studies or IKMAS), a social science research institute at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). She is also an affiliate Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Norani’s research interests and work are in social and sociological theory, intellectuals and the intellectual cultures of Third-World societies, sociology of Islam and Muslim societies, human and woman’s rights in Islam. Norani Othman was one of the founding members of the SIS Forum Malaysia, a Muslim woman’s organization popularly known as Sisters in Islam and currently sits in its Policy & Management Committee. She was also a founding member of the Malaysian Association of Social Science (PSSM). She is the editor of Shari’a Law and the Modern Nation State: A Malaysian Symposium (SIS Forum Publications: Kuala Lumpur, 1994), Gender, Culture and Religion: Equal before God , Unequal before Man (with Cecilia Ng Soon Chim; PSSM: Kuala Lumpur, 1995). Her publications since 2000 are: Malaysia Menangani Globalisasi: Pelaku atau Mangsa? [Malaysia’s Experience of Globalization: Actor or Captive?] (editor with Sumit K. Mandal, UKM Press: Bangi, 2000), Capturing Globalization (co-editor with James Mittelman, Routledge: London, 2001); The Malaysian Electoral System: A Report” (co-author with Mavis Puthucheary, UKM Press: Bangi, 2003); Norani Othman (ed.) (2003) Rethinking the Role of Public Intellectuals: A SEAF Dialogue 2000. UKM Press: Bangi, Malaysia; Malaysia: Islam, Society and Politics (co-editor with Virginia Hooker, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) Publications: Singapore, 2003; Elections and Democracy (co-editor with Mavis Puthucheary, UKM Press 2005) and editor of Muslim Women and the Challenge of Islamic Extremism (2005).
Jasbir Puar, is a Professor in the department of Women's & Gender Studies, and a graduate faculty member in the department of Geography at Rutgers. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and diaspora studies; queer theory; South Asian cultural studies; and tourism studies. Among publications are “Homonormativity and its Others,” in Gender, Place, and Culture (Winter 2005), forthcoming; “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” in Social Text 84-85 vol. 23 nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2005), “On Torture: Abu Ghraib,” in Radical History Review (Fall 2005), “The Remaking of a Model Minority: Perverse Projectiles under the Specter of (Counter)Terrorism,” with Amit Rai, in Social Text 80 vol. 22 no. 3 (Fall 2004); "Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots," with Amit Rai, in Social Text 72 vol. 20 no. 3 (Fall 2002), and Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Duke University Press (2002). Jasbir’s forthcoming publication is entitled, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Duke University Press (November, 2007).
Madhavi Sunder, is Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis and a Carnegie Scholar. She has published regularly on the topics of intellectual property, Islam and women’s rights, and law and culture in several prestigious academic journals including the Yale Law Journal and the Stanford Law Review, and on Findlaw.com. She has lectured internationally, speaking to audiences at the most prestigious law schools in the nation, and to lawyers, politicians and scholars in diverse countries including Brazil, India, Jordan, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. She is the editor of Gender and Feminist Theory in Law and Society (2006). Adopting an interdisciplinary method, Professor Sunder argues that cultural and social theory can help us to modernize antiquated laws, which rely primarily on abstracted economic analysis. She shows that law’s antiquated approach to culture in a wide range of doctrinal areas, from the First Amendment to human rights law to intellectual property, paradoxically works to buttress the power of traditional cultural authorities over the claims of dissenters within cultural communities.
Amina Wadud, is best known as the "lady-imam". She has been a student of Islamic thought and praxis since taking the shahadah (declaration of faith) while an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. After beginning intensive study of Arabic at UPenn, she lived in Muslim North Africa. She would return to North Africa to develop her Arabic language fluency, including attending al-Azhar, and Cairo University as well as American University in Egypt. She was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. There she completed her MA and Ph.D. Her dissertation became the ground- breaking: Qur'an and Woman: Re-Reading the Sacred Text from A Woman's Perspective. It was published while she was in Malaysia teaching its substance and significance to a fledgling Muslim women's group that she helped name: Sisters in Islam.
Her second book: Inside the Gender Jihad was released the same day her first grandchild was born, in 2006. She is currently visiting scholar at the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley California and working on Ethics and Gender in Islam. While at the Starr King School she learned her own ancestry was North African-Arab-Berber Muslims, dating back to one century after the Prophet Muhammad.
Panel Presenters
Fauzia E. Ahmed is Director of Women’s Studies at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She has twenty-five years of experience with development programs and policies for low-income families in a variety of countries. She is currently writing a book entitled, Redefining Manhood: Gender Empowerment, Poverty Alleviation and Masculinity. fauzia.ahmed@iup.edu
Ayisha Ashley Al-Sayyad is pursuing her graduate work in Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Ayisha is the winner of the Lesbian Caucus Award from the National Women’s Studies Association as part of her Master’s research in Women’s Studies. alsayyad@email.arizona.edu
Azza Basarudin is a PhD candidate in the Women’s Studies Program at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Through a transnational ethnography of two women’s organizations in Malaysia and Egypt, her research explores feminist political engagement of religious and cultural transformation in relation to gender. She is a member of the Radical Arab Women’s Activist Network (RAWAN). azza@ucla.edu
Roksana Bahramitash holds two post-Doctorates, the first with the Globalism Project at Simon Fraser University working on female poverty in Mexico, the second a two-year post doc granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRCC). She has published a book on globalization entitled, Liberation from Liberalization: Gender and Globalization in Southeast Asia, (Zed Books, 2005). She produced a documentary on Afghan women Beyond the Burqa (2004). bahramitash@gmail.com
Srimati Basu is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Anthropology at DePauw University, Indiana. Her research on Indian women and inheritance laws has been published as She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property and Propriety (SUNY Press, 1999), and she is the editor of the Dowry and Inheritance volume in the Kali for Women series, Issues in Indian Feminism. sbasu@depauw.edu
Elizabeth Bucar is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research and writing focuses on the interaction of clerical rhetoric and women’s social movements within two religious traditions: Roman Catholicism and Shii Islam. She is working on a manuscript titled, Creative Conformity: The Feminist Tactics of Catholic and Shii Women. emb62@georgetown.edu
Natasha Dar is affilitated with Stanford University’s Department of Cultural & Social Anthropology. Her research interests have focused on the dynamics between Shari’a Law and the role of the state. Her extensive field research in North Africa examines how marriage and divorce relate to and might exist within the informal structure of Islamic Family Law (IFL) in North African diaspora communities of suburban Paris. ndar@stanford.edu
Jennifer Fluri is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Women's and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research areas include: gender and leadership in Afghanistan; the spatial and social impacts of international economic and geopolitical intervention on gender relations and the everyday lives of the Afghan people; epistemologies of Islam and Feminism in relation to gender politics; the intersections of gender and identity with religion, politics, and culture in South Asia and the Middle East. jennifer.fluri@dartmouth.edu
Juliet Gentile-Koren has an MA in Women's History from Sarah Lawrence College. Her research interests include: the history of women in tasawwuf and gender symbolism in Islamic theology. She has written articles on Islamic mysticism, Sufi poetry and tasawwuf, and gender issues in Islam. She is currently developing a manuscript on the roles of women in the transmission of the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi lineage from Turkey to North America. j.gentilekoren@gmail.com
Hilary Kalmbach is a doctoral student at University of Oxford, St Antony’s College. She spent a year abroad in Syria as a Fulbright Fellow. Her research interests include Islamic religious authority in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and modern Syrian and Egyptian history. Her dissertation examines changes in the religious authority of the Egyptian ulema in the early twentieth century. hilary.kalmbach@sant.ox.ac.uk
Damla Isik has recently earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona with a graduate certificate on Women's Studies. Her research interests include globalization, gender, and labor politics; media studies; nationalism, religion and politics of representation; neo-liberalism, market liberalization, and politics of re-regulation. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Western Connecticut State University. damla@email.arizona.edu
Christopher Kelly is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Boston College. His research interests include sociology of knowledge and ideology, discourse analysis, qualitative methods, spirituality, gay and lesbian studies, postcolonial studies, Islam, and Palestinian society. His current research investigates social dimensions of knowledge formation among student activists. christopher.kelly.6@bc.edu
Peter McMurray Peter McMurray is the Associate Curator of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, a collection of epic and lyric oral poetry from the former Yugoslavia housed in Widener Library at Harvard. He holds degrees in Classical literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures, and is currently pursuing graduate studies at Brandeis University. He has lived and conducted fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Montenegro) and participated in seminars in Kosovo and Bosnia. His research interests include oral poetics, mythologies of the Islamicate (especially in Europe), the development of the Bosnian language, and hip hop diaspora (especially in Bosnia and Kosovo). plmcmurray@gmail.com
Tina Nebe, Ph.D. is Heinrich Böll Fellow in the Gender and Development Programme at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva. There, she assists in coordinating a research project on religion, politics and gender equality comparing eleven countries throughout the world. Tina specialises in the fields of racism, gender equality and ethnoreligious conflict, especially in Europe and in the Middle East. She holds a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute. tina.nebe@eui.eu.
Mitra Rastegar is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her interests include secularism and religion, social movements and the politics of culture in the United States and the Middle East. She has written on the politics of representation of the Middle East through an analysis of the Western media's reception of Reading Lolita in Tehran, the highly successful memoir of an Iranian professor, Azar Nafisi. She formerly worked at Political Research Associates where she analyzed antidemocratic, right-wing and anti-immigrant movements in the United States. mitraellen@gmail.com
Dina M. Siddiqi is an anthropologist and research consultant with a special interest in Islam, human rights, and transnational feminist politics. Her recent publications include “Communalizing the Criminal or Criminalizing the Communal? Locating Minority Politics in Bangladesh” in Basu and Roy (eds.) Violence and Democracy in India, (2007); “Gender, Politics and Women’s Rights in Bangladesh” in Harvard Asia Quarterly, (2006). She divides her time between Bangladesh and the US where she teaches anthropology and gender studies on a part-time basis. She is also a member of the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies. dmsiddiqi@yahoo.com
Surbhi Tiwari is currently an M.Phil Research Scholar at the University of Pune, India and also associated with the Lokniti Collective's Youth Case Study Programme ( 2006-2007) of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, India. Her research interests are in the fields of sports sociology, leisure studies, cultures of population and personal narratives. surbhitiwari@yahoo.co.in
Berna Turam is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies at Hampshire College. She is a political sociologist who uses ethnographic methods to explore state-society interaction in everyday life. Her areas of interest are Islam, secularism, gender politics, Muslim women and the state, democracy and reform, civil society and nationalism. She is the author of Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford University Press, 2007) bturam@hampshire.edu
Jasmin Zine is currently an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada where she teaches courses on critical race and ethnic studies, education and social justice and race, gender and imperialism. In the field of Muslim Women’s Studies, she guest edited a special issue of AJISS on women and Islam with Katherine Bullock in 2002. She recently received the New Scholar Award from the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (of the Harvard Divinity School) for her article entitled “Creating a Critical-Faith-Centred Space for Anti-Racist Feminism: Reflections of A Muslim Scholar-Activist.” She presently has a book manuscript under review entitled: Staying On the Straight Path: Unraveling The Politics Of Faith, Gender, Knowledge and Identity in Islamic Schools. jzine@wlu.ca
Panel Discussants:
¦ Huma Dar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of South & South East Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality, and in Film Studies. Dar is a published poet. Her work is focused on the intersections and co-formations of gender, religion, class, caste, sexuality, and national politics of South Asia, specifically analyzing the cinematic, literary, and political representations of Muslims in India. She is the co-founder of the UC Berkeley Townsend Center Working Group on Muslim Identities & Cultures. simurgh@gmail.com
¦ Linda Dittmar is a Professor of literature at UMass-Boston's English Department. In addition to many essays and book chapters she has edited Multiple Voices In Feminist Film Criticism and From Hanoi To Hollywood; The Vietnam War In American Film. She is currently collaborating on a photo-text about Palestinian villages destroyed around 1948 inside Israel's "green line" border. lindadittmar@aol.com
¦ Darren Kew is a Professor in the Dispute Resolution Program at UMass Boston. He studies the connection between democratic institution building in Africa and the development of political cultures that support democracy, particularly in terms of the role of civil society groups in this development. He is the author of the forthcoming book Civil Society, Conflict Resolution, and Building Democracy in Nigeria (Syracuse University Press), and recently authored a study for USAID on the role of Islamist movements in democratic development in Northern Nigeria. Darren.Kew@umb.edu
¦ Nazli Kibria is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Her books include Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans and Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities. Her forthcoming book titled Muslims in Diaspora: Bangladeshis at Home and Abroad, looks at developments of religious and national identity among Bangladeshi labor migrants to the Middle East and Malaysia, and also in the Bangladeshi immigrant communities in Britain and the U.S. nkibria@bu.edu
¦ Mickaella Perina is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and the director of the Program of Study in Philosophy and Law at UMass Boston. Her research focuses on construction of identities, immigration, group rights and the rule of law in liberal democracies. She has numerous publications on citizenship in France and in the French Caribbean including a book published by L'Harmattan, Paris, 1997. Mickaella.perina@umb.edu
¦ Liz Philipose teaches in the Department of Women's Studies at California State University Long Beach. Her research interests are in global politics, transnational feminism, international law and gender, race and empire. She is most recently the author of "The politics of pain and the end of empire", International Feminist Journal of Politics; and "The politics of pain and the uses of torture", Signs. She organized the symposium on "Gender, Race, Islam and the 'War on Terror' at Simon Fraser University in 2006. ephilipo@csulb.edu
¦ C. Heike Schotten is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where she teaches political theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. She recently completed a book manuscript detailing the queer consequences of Nietzsche's revolutionary political philosophy, and is currently at work on a new project that examines Nietzsche's various Orientalist obsessions with China, Islam, Hinduism, and India. heike.schotten@umb.edu
¦ Hamideh Sedghi is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. A professor of political science, she is the first Iranian female in the United States who wrote on women in Iran from a social science perspective. Her Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling, and Reveiling, was published by Cambridge University Press, 2007. hsedghi@fas.harvard.edu
¦ Khanum Shaikh is pursuing her doctoral degree in the Women's Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is currently working on her dissertation on gender and religious study in a transnational age. khanums@ucla.edu
Conference Organizers
Elora Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She holds a Ph.D. from the Women's Studies Program at Clark University (2004). Her teaching and research interests are in critical development studies, third world/transnational feminsims, globalization and women's organizing in Bangladesh. Her work has appeared in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and in edited anthologies. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript titled, ‘Transnationalism Reversed’: Engaging Development, NGO Politics, and Women's Organizing in Bangladesh. Elora.chowdhury@umb.edu
Leila Farsakh is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She holds a PhD from the University of London (2003), and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in the UK (1990). She has published on questions related to Palestinian labor migration, the Oslo Peace Process, and international migration in a wide range of journals including Middle East Journal, the European Journal of Development Research, Journal of Palestine Studies and Le Monde Diplomatique. Her book, Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labor, Land and Occupation, has been published by Routedge Press in 2005. Leila.farsakh@umb.edu
Rajini Srikanth is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research and writing interests include Asian American Studies, Race and Literature, Pedagogy and Multiculturalism, Native American Literature. Her publications include The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (Temple UP 2004); White Women in Racialized Spaces: Imaginative Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature (SUNY Press, 2002); Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing (Rutgers 2001). She has also co-edited several books, including A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America (Temple U.P., 1998); Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (Asian American Writers' Workshop, 1996). Rajini.srikanth@umb.edu
Jennifer Howard is pursuing a Masters of Science in International Relations at UMass Boston’s McCormack School of Public Affairs. Her developing research interests include the dynamics among rule of law, religion, and international conflict. Jennyhoward0@gmail.com
The Institute is free and open to the public. No registration is necessary for non-presenting attendees. Please join us!
*Conference Attendees with Disabilities : Anyone requiring disability-related accommodations in order to fully participate in this event should contact Jennifer Howard by email at jennifer.howard003@umb.edu or by phone at 508-685-5988 as soon as possible.
Accomodation for attendees from out of town: Please check our "General Information" page for hotel listings near UMass Boston.
The 2007 Fall Institute is made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
