Past Events
View some of our past events to learn how a range of disciplines contribute to the study of comparative Muslim societies. Whether your academic study focuses on history, politics, gender studies, anthropology, art history, or another field, there is an event you can attend or a way for you to engage with us.
Fall 2022
- Made in China: Artworks for Chinese Muslims
- Constituting Afghanistan: Rediscovering Afghan Legal History between the Ottoman and British Empires
- Halal and/or Qingzhen: A Historical Process and Recent Policies of Sinicization of Islam in China
- The Belitung Shipwreck:Connections to the Ancient and Modern Muslim World
- What Happens to Religion After a “Religious” Revolution?
- Nomads and Demons: The Painted Lives in the “Muhammad Siyah Qalam” Corpus in Central Asia
- Laboring for the Nation: Transnational Capital and ‘Muslim’ Women’s Work in Bangladesh
Spring 2022
- Living in Multiple Boundaries: Migrant Workers in the Arab Gulf
- Islamic Libraries from Spain to India (ca. 900-ca. 1730)
- Terror Capitalism: Producing the 'Terrorist-Worker' in Northwest China
- Navigating Paradigms of Chastity and Sensuality in the Mughal Court
- The Policies of Counter-Radicalization in Europe: Two Case Studies
- Black American Muslims and African Sufi Orders
- Muslim Environmental Ethics as Environmental Justice
Fall 2021
- Sect, Difference, and Interreligious Marriage in Lebanon
- In the Shadow of Gothic: Ottoman Mosque Architecture in Cyprus
- Shifting Channels and Logistical Power: Muslim Middlemen, Low-end Trade, and Local State in Yiwu, China
- Restoring the Sultans in the Arabian Sea: Imperial Careers in the Nineteenth Century
- Rare Islamic Books in the Olin Library Collection
- Strange Parallels, Surprising Encounters: Catholicism, Islam, and Analogist Rituals in the Late Sixteenth Century Philippines
- Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History
Spring 2021
- A Genealogy of African Islamic Modernity
- Islam in the Estuary of Indonesia: Hamka, History, and the Nation
- Women, Religious Education, and the Transmission of Islamic Knowledge in Kenya
- Farmers, Traders, Slaves, and Princes: Retrieving Lives of Eighteenth Century Inhabitants in and around Colombo, Sri Lanka
- Oil-Gotten Gains: Petrodollars, Abscam, and Arab American Activism, 1973–1981
Fall 2020
- Iranian Pilgrims in Traffic: Historicity and Sociality of Saint Visitation across Borders
- In Search of a Modern Muslim: The Life and Works of Sayyid Ahmad Khan
- The Institutional Sources of Islamic "Moderation" in Contemporary Java, Indonesia
- Spiritual Subjects: Center Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire
- Atypical Muslims: A Discourse of "True" and "Integrated" Islam among Young Italian-Bangladeshis Living in Rome
- Rare Islamic Books in the Olin Library Collection
Spring 2020
- East African Muslim in Exile: Zanzibar's Nationalists and Muslim Critiques of State Tyranny in Zanzibar
- Pluralism, Difference, and an Ethics of Hospitality: Reclaiming the Muslim Woman's Narrative on the War on Terror
- Training the Imam: Locating American Sites of Religious Authority
- Life off the Grid: Electricity, Power, and the State in Lebanon and Beyond
- "My Heretic, My Subject": Ottoman-Safavid Border Formation and the Politics of Sectarianism in the Sixteenth Century
- Islamic Schools in France: Minority Integration and Separatism in Western Society
Fall 2019
- State, Religion, and Literary Production under the Islamic Republic of Iran
- Being Muslim and Female in Burma: Two Perspectives
- Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Rethinking Arabness and non-Arabness across the Muslim World
- How the Slaves Freed Themselves: The Khivan Slave Uprising and the Myth of Russian Abolitionism in Central Asia
- Islam and Labor: The Indonesian Experience
- Rare Islamic Books in the Olin Library Collection