Teaching Religion and Literature provides a practical engagement with the pedagogical possibilities of teaching religion courses using literature, teaching literature classes using religion, and teaching Religion and Literature as a discipline. Featuring chapters written by awar…
"Saba Mahmood';s 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action. Mahmood';s book is a study of women';s participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East. Mahmood--a feminist social anthropologist with left-wing, secular political values--wanted…
"Saba Mahmoo©d';s 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action. Mahmoo©d';s book is a study of wome©n';s participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East. Mahmood--a feminist social anthropologist with left-wing, secular political values--wan…
"Christopher Melchert proposes to historicize Islamic renunciant piety (zuhd). As the conquest period wound down in the early eighth century c.e., renunciants set out to maintain the contempt of worldly comfort and loyalty to a greater cause that had characterized the community …
Christopher Melchert proposes to historicize Islamic renunciant piety (zuhd). As the conquest period wound down in the early eighth century c.e., renunciants set out to maintain the contempt of worldly comfort and loyalty to a greater cause that had characterized the community o…
“Every Man is Now in the Market” is a study of informal institutional change in medieval Liguria during the second half of the thirteenth century. Informal institutions are social rules that are enforced by commonly held values and norms, rather than by any law. The goal of this…
This dissertation contributes to the growing scholarship attempting to analyze and understand devout religious engagement, and to cull from its study insights about human motivation, complexity and desire. It considers the lives, goals and activities of pious Muslim women in Cai…
The dissertation explores the lives of educated, urban, Bangladeshi women who come together in religious discussion circles, known as Talim, Tafsir, Islam class, Dars and Quran class , to learn about the Quran and Hadith, and to strive towards a life where Islam has a greater pr…
This dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of a newly emergent religious movement among women in urban Cairo that is part of the broader Islamic resurgence in contemporary Egypt. In this movement, women from a wide cross-section of the society are vigorously engaged in the te…
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and data culled from interviews, this manuscript explores how Islamic ethics shape the epistemic approaches of Muslim intellectuals to liberal democracy and corollary paradigms of western modernity. Specifically, it examines a c…
The dissertation that follows is an historical investigation into Egyptian Jewish society of the thirteenth century and the legacy of its paramount leader, Abraham Maimonides (1186-1237). The dawn of the thirteenth century witnessed great transformations and upheavals in Egypt, …
During the High Middle Ages, the city of Verona in Northern Italy stood at the geographic, political, and social crossroads of imperial and papal power. However, during the first half of the thirteenth century, Lord Ezzelino da Romano’s affiliation with the Holy Roman Emperor, F…
Over the past decade, the Israeli political landscape has been transformed by the rise of the Sephardic Torah Guardians (Shas). Drawing upon a constituency of "traditional" and "ultra-orthodox" Middle Eastern Jews, Shas has succeeded in bringing groups previously marginalized by…
This dissertation is about the transformation of an African pastoral system, involving the intertwined processes of intensification and individualization. The intensification of the pastoral system is a response to the disappearance of rangelands, and has led to a significant in…
This dissertation is an examination of Queen Melisende's piety, power, and patronage in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem of the twelfth century. The principal sources used to assess her reign are William of Tyre's A History of the Deeds Done Beyond the Sea and the royal charters i…
The revitalization of Islam in Indonesia over the past 25 years is part of a global revival of Islam. At a time when religion is reasserting itself in public life, this study investigates how religion can empower women in the public sphere and how religion is part of the ways wo…
This dissertation, based on ethnographic research in Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, explores how Muslims are negotiating what it means to be "modern" in the contemporary world. Focusing primarily on the experiences of young women, it looks at competing discourses of gender…
