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Department for the Study of Religion
Jackman Humanities Building, Room 315 170 St. George St. |
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About
On research leave for academic year 2019-2020.
I received my Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. My research stands at the intersection of Islamic legal studies, the anthropology of Islam, and studies of capitalism, and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in the Levant. Throughout my work I address how, beginning in the nineteenth century, Islamic tradition has transformed while continuing to challenge and provide alternatives to dominant sensibilities, conceptions, and institutions of the modern world. I am currently finishing my book manuscript, tentatively entitled Reviving the Waqf: Property, Law, and Religion in Modern Beirut, where I examine the contemporary Islamic revival of a centuries-old charitable practice of pious endowment under global capitalism and a regime of modern nation-states. I argue that these attempts to rekindle the practice of waqf reorder key concepts in the Islamic tradition, namely public benefit, family, and intent.
Primary Teaching
Recent Undergraduate Courses
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- NMC 103 Islamic World (Fall)
- NMC 241 Anthropology of the Middle East
- RLG 352 Postcolonial Islam
- RLG 353 Politics of Charity (Winter)
- RLG 355 Living Islam/ Anthropology of Islam
Recent Graduate Courses
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- RLG 3527 Anthropology of Islam
- RLG 3616 Islamic Law and Society
- NMC 2081 Anthropology of the Middle East