Mellon Sawyer Seminar

We are delighted to begin planning for our 2009-10 Mellon Sawyer Seminar entitled
Diversity and Conformity in Muslim Societies: Historical Coexistence and Contemporary Struggles. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Seminar will meet twice each month from September through April to discuss issues of immediate interest to the community of scholars in the region who focus on the Middle East and the broader Muslim world.

The Sawyer Seminar will be divided into three thematic sections; at the end of each, there will be a two-day conference. The first section, “Nationalists and Salafis,” analyzes contemporary pressures encouraging diverse societies to conform to increasingly well-defined ideologies. The conference will be held in October 2009. The second conference, “Sacred Spaces, Sacred Sounds,” is scheduled for January 2010. In this conference and the seminar meetings that will precede it, we want to explore the richly varied architectural, musical, and linguistic styles that span “Muslim societies.” The final workshop will be held in April 2010. “Hermaphrodites, Minorities, and Constitutions” will give us an opportunity to examine ways in which sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities have been incorporated–or excluded.

The success of the Seminar will be contingent upon wide, interdisciplinary participation and we welcome your participation. Our plan is to circulate papers for each of the twice-monthly seminar sessions, and request a discussant. If your research is related to these questions, we hope you will consider presenting a paper. We hope to publish some of the papers from the seminars and workshops.

For complete information on this Mellon Sawyer Seminar, please visit http://cgi.unc.edu/research/mellon-sawyer/09-10/about.php