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DISC Alumni contribute to public knowledge in their academic profession. This selective list features publications, including books and edited volumes by previous students:
Sam Kigar
PhD Graduate Program in Religion, 2018
Current position: Associate Professor of Islam in the Department of Religion, Spirituality, and Society. His research interests include the history of Muslim political, legal, theological, and mystical thought. He is specifically focused on Muslim conceptions of territoriality and spatial belonging, the history of Islam in the Maghreb, and religion and politics.
Two recent articles address the themes of this book-in-progress: "God’s Feminine Shadow: Fatema Mernissi’s Muslim Political Theology of Territory," in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and “Itineracy, Homecoming, and Territory in the Maghrib Over the Longue Durée," in the edited volume, A World of Realms: A Long View of Diplomacy and Spatiality in the Premodern Islamic World.
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At the close of the Cold War, the Moroccan feminist Fatema Mernissi joined intellectuals from around the world in analyzing the place of religion, culture, and civilization in the “new world order.” This article analyzes how Mernissi developed psychoanalytic, sexual difference feminism from within Muslim sources to critique this emergent form of territoriality. It shows how she attacked Muslim states, particularly Morocco, for appropriating premodern Muslim political theology to narrate their sovereignties in a world dominated by US-led militarism and neoliberalism. Then, it demonstrates how she used female figures, including the pre-Islamic goddess al-ʿUzza and the Moroccan spirit Haguza, to reveal how sexual difference would undermine exclusive claims to territorial sovereignty. Finally, it turns to Jonathan Z. Smith’s rejoinder to Mircea Eliade. Mernissi’s theory helps us to understand that Smith identified an important relationship between religion and territory but in a way that was androcentric and culturally specific
Fahad Ahmad Bishara
PhD History, 2012
Current position: Associate Professor, Indian Ocean History Rouhollah Ramazani Associate Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies, University of Virginia. Professor Bishara specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world.
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Fahad Ahmed Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950, Cambridge University Press, 2017
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Bishara's second book, Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (forthcoming, University of California Press) tells a connected history of the Gulf and Indian Ocean from the deck of a twentieth-century dhow, drawing on the archives of a number of merchant and dhow captain families from Kuwait. The project, a microhistory that unfolds over a broad canvas, takes on issues of global capitalism, international law, empire, and mobility in historical writing.
Kecia Ali
PhD Religious Studies, 2002
Current position: Professor of Religion, Boston University. Professor Ali is a scholar of religion, gender, and ethics. Ali writes about the Muslim tradition, including premodern law and prophetic biography and modern intersections of Muslim and Western discourses about women and sexuality.
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Kecia Ali, Tying the Knot: A Feminist/Womanist Guide to Muslim Marriage in America, Boston: OpenBU, 2022
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M. Brett Wilson
PhD Religious Studies, 2009
Current position: Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at Central European University and the Director of the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS). His research and teaching engage the fields of religious, intellectual, and cultural history with specialization in late Ottoman and modern Turkish Contexts.
