Spring 2026
'Sacred Energy Tourism in China, Japan and the Southwestern US: Preliminary Comparisons' with Elijah Siegler
February 16, 2026
Noon–1:30 p.m.
Coor Hall 4403
Based on years of fieldwork in China and Asheville, NC, as well as new research in Tokyo, Southern Japan, Texas and Arizona, this informal discussion will consider the vexed relationship between New Age spirituality, group tourism and the natural landscape.
This event is presented by the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and The Asia Center.
About the speaker
The leading expert in the field of American Daoism, Elijah Siegler is professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston. He is the co-author (with David Palmer) of the award-winning "Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality" (University of Chicago Press, 2017), the author of "New Religious Movements" (Prentice-Hall, 2006) and the editor of "Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order" (Baylor University Press, 2016).
'From Palm Leaf to Pixel: Muni Jambūvijaya's Manuscript Preservation Efforts in Jaisalmer' with Lynna Dhanani
February 25, 2026
Noon–2 p.m.
Coor Hall 4403
The Jain scholar-monk Jambūvijaya (1923-2009) opened a set of important archives to the West while simultaneously revamping indigenous knowledge-preservation through his enormously successful cataloguing, scanning, copying and digitizing efforts at the Jaisalmer bhaṇḍār (Jain manuscript libraries) located at the Jaisalmer Fort in the Rajasthani desert. Jain studies would not have advanced without his willingness to use modern and traditional methods and engage local and international scholars, therefore opening the "treasures" of the Jaisalmer bhaṇḍār (and other Jain libraries) to the world. Despite such influence and output, there remains limited studies of his collective influence on Jain and Indological studies.
About the speaker
Lynna Dhanani is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of California, Davis after receiving a PhD from Yale University. She co-curated the 2022-23 exhibition of Jain shrine hangings (choḍ) at the UCLA Fowler museum and is a co-author for the recent exhibition volume titled "Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings." In 2022-23, she was also a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago as part of the Entanglements of Indian Pasts project for her work on the Indian manuscript projects of the great 20th-century Jain scholar monk Muni Jambuvijaya. Lynna's research interests include Sanskrit and Prakrit literatures, yoga, Indian philosophy, and South Asian religious art and material culture.
This event is presented in partnership between the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the South Asia Council.
'Parallel Modernities: Women, Reform and Print Culture in Iran and Turkey' with Razieh Araghi
March 17, 2026
10:30–Noon
Coor Hall 4403 and online
Drawing on women’s periodicals, serialized fiction, reader correspondence, advice literature, and translation series published between the 1910s and 1930s, this talk will show that print culture functioned as a contested political arena. Iranian and Ottoman-Turkish women engaged in what Deniz Kandiyoti terms “patriarchal bargaining,” but they did so collectively and publicly through the press. They reframed motherhood as civic authority, challenged child marriage and economic dependency, critiqued state regulation of sexuality, and redefined namus (honor) in ways that unsettled the moral foundations of nationalist reform.
By placing Iranian and Turkish women in comparative dialogue, this project challenges linear accounts of secular-nationalist modernization and complicates Western feminist narratives that cast Middle Eastern women as either oppressed subjects or beneficiaries of state emancipation. Instead, I argue that women wrote from what bell hooks calls the “margin”— not merely as a site of exclusion, but as a strategic location from which alternative visions of citizenship could be articulated. This talk ultimately asks: What happens when we read the “mother of the nation” not as a tool of the state, but as a political actor who reshaped the terms of modernity itself?
About the speaker
Razieh Araghi is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of International Letters and Cultures. Her research explores the intersections of modernity, translation, and women’s intellectual history. Her current project examines how Iranian and Ottoman/Turkish women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped discourses of modernity through translation, adaptation, and self-authorship in periodicals and other media. She also works on the role of cross-cultural literary exchanges and translation in redefining narratives of modernization beyond Eurocentric frameworks.
Her broader research and teaching interests include Middle Eastern literary modernities, feminist theory, world literature, and translation studies. She also works on the circulation of French and English translations and their role in shaping cross-cultural literary exchanges.
Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), 2025.
M.A. Literature, Texas State University, San Marcos. 2019.
B.A. English Language and Literature, University of Tabriz. Tabriz, Iran. 2013.
Fall 2025
'Rethinking 'Politics' in the History of Islamic Political Thought' with Han Hsien Liew
September 11, 2025
10:30 a.m.–Noon
Coor Hall 4403
In this workshop, Dr. Liew will speak about his forthcoming book, Preaching Pious
Rulership in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Jawzi's Political Thought, which studies the relationship
between preaching, politics, and emotions in the medieval Islamic world. In considering the
role of piety and homiletics in Islamic political thought, the book aims to rethink the concept
of the "political" in the context of Islam. Of special interest to graduate students, Dr. Liew
will also speak about his experience of converting his dissertation into a book and of
obtaining a book contract.
About the speaker
Han Hsien Liew is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. In addition to the history of Islamic political thought, his research interests include Qur’anic exegesis, Islamic theology, Islam in Southeast Asia and the history of emotions. His work has been published in Al-Qanṭara: Revista de Estudios Árabes, Journal of Islamic Studies, Journal of the American Oriental Society and Arabica. He was recently awarded a Herodotus Fund Membership from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey
'AmeRícan Muslims: Cosmopolitan Being and Co-becoming Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam' with Ken Chitwood
September 24, 2025
Noon–1:30 p.m.
Coor Hall 4403 and online
Among Puerto Rican converts to Islam, marginalization is a fact of daily life. Their “authenticity” is questioned by other Muslims and by fellow Borícua on the island and in the United States. At the same time, they exist under the shadow of US colonization and as Muslims in the context of American empire. To be a Puerto Rican Muslim, then, is to negotiate identity at numerous intersections of diversity and difference. Drawing on years of ethnographic research and more than a hundred interviews conducted in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and online, Ken Chitwood tells the story of Puerto Rican Muslims as they construct a shared sense of peoplehood through everyday practices. This lecture thus provides a study of cosmopolitanism not as a political ideal but as a mundane social reality—a reality that complicates scholarly and public conversations about race, ethnicity, and religion in the Americas.
About the speaker
Dr. Ken Chitwood holds a PhD from the University of Florida and is currently a postdoctoral researcher pursuing Habilitation with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth. He is also an Affiliate Researcher with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. His first book, The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean (2021) won the Religion News Association’s Best Nonfiction Book Award. His second, Borícua Muslims: The Everyday Lives of Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (UTexas Press) releases in October 2025, and his third, an edited anthology, Engaged Spirituality: Stories of Religious Inspiration, Resilience, and Work for the Common Good (Bloomsbury) is forthcoming in 2026. Chitwood has been reviewing books on Christianity, Islam, religion, anthropology, culture, and history for eleven years with Publisher's Weekly, the Houston Chronicle, Reading Religion from the American Academy of Religion, and other scholarly and popular publications.
'A Demand for Presence: This World and How We Continue' with Diana Coleman
November 13
10:30–Noon
Coor Hall 4403 and online
In a time of rampant anti-intellectualism, when expertise is daily demeaned and devalued, how does one maintain a committed presence within the aching work of bringing to light and speaking truths into the world?
About the speaker
Diana Coleman is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. As NAU’s 2024/25 College of Arts and Letters teacher of the year, NAU’s Interns to Scholars program 2024/25 Mentor of the Year, and an invited keynote speaker for the June 2026 “Camps, Belonging, and Abolition Democracy” conference at University of Graz in Austria, Dr. Coleman is committed to empowering her students, continuing her research and activism, and to reaching broader publics. She has researched, presented, and participated in dozens of conferences, panels, and workshops, guest lecturing nationally and internationally. Her publications include a chapter in Guantánamo and American Empire: The Humanities Respond, “El Sur También Existe: Imagining futures” in Cultural Dynamics, and articles in two special issues of Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language and Culture. Her activism includes the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, the Free Shaker Aamer campaign, panel member at the Parliamentary Meeting on Shaker Aamer’s behalf at the Westminster House of Commons, attendee at the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture and an organizer of the Sayyarah for Sufiyan campaign. She was a Humanities Scholar and lecturer for the 2023 TOM KIEFER: El Sueño Americano / The American Dream exhibit at the Coconino Center for the Arts and recently completed in-depth training with the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program through Temple University.