Calendar

All meetings are held in the 4th floor conference room of the Global Education Center at UNC and are open to the entire academic community. Thursday evening seminars begin at 6:00pm. For schedules and speaker details for weekend workshops, please see their respective pages. If you would like a copy of the paper(s) being presented, please direct your RSVP to vierra@email.unc.edu

Feb 5–6, 2010
WORKSHOP: Nationalists and Salafis

Feb 18, 2010
Michael Laffan, History, Princeton. Michael Laffan is an Assistant Professor of History and the Philip and Beulah Rollins Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton University. His research and teaching focus on Islam in Southeast Asia, particularly in the context of nationalism, Dutch colonialism, and orientalism. Following his doctoral work, Dr. Laffan completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, The Netherlands. In 2003, he published his first book, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds, in which he outlines the significant—and often unrecognized—role of Islam in the Indonesian nationalist movement, challenging widespread conceptions that the movement was driven by a secular, Dutch-educated elite. In his current book project, The Makings of Indonesian Islam, Prof. Laffan is examining the exchanges between Islamic reformers with intellectual links to Cairo and influential colonial scholars, arguing that they set the parameters for the ways in which Islam has been, and still is, imagined in specific ways in both Southeast Asia and the Academy.

Mar 18, 2010
Zeynep Türkyılmaz, Sawyer Seminar Post-Doctoral Fellow, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Born in İstanbul, Zeynep Türkyılmaz recently completed her PhD in History at the University of California-Los Angeles. Previously, she earned a BA in political science and international relations, as well as an MA, from Bosphorus University.

Apr 1, 2010
John Hanson, History, Indiana. John Hanson is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the African Studies Program at Indiana University-Bloomington, as well as the editor of the journal Africa Today. He teaches on a variety of themes in African history, with an emphases on social and cultural transformations in the 19th and 20th centuries, and focuses his research primarily on Muslim communities in West Africa. Dr. Hanson is the author of Migration, Jihad and Muslim Authority in West Africa: The Futanke Colonies in Karta, published in 1996, and the co-author of a collection of translated and annotated Arabic documents called After the Jihad: The Reign of Ahmad al-Kabir in the Western Sudan, published in 1991. His current research examines Muslim African engagements with modernity in the twentieth century, particularly those of the Ahmadiyya community, a trans-national Islamic movement with a south Asian genesis but a large following in West Africa. He focuses on the experiences of African converts in the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) who played leading roles as missionaries and teachers in Ahmadi schools, and in doing so, he works with a diverse variety of sources, including oral reminiscences, Arabic correspondence, and colonial documents. Prof. Hanson has been awarded the Trustee's Teaching Award for the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University and has received research fellowships through the Fulbright-Hays program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation program at the Library of Congress.

Apr 23–24, 2010
WORKSHOP: Sacred Spaces, Sacred Sounds