Faculty Seminars
Faculty Seminars bring together Columbia faculty members and colleagues from different departments and disciplines for semester-long investigations of interdisciplinary topics. Below are descriptions of this year’s seminars as well as ongoing faculty projects. For descriptions of past faculty seminars, please visit here.
Columbia faculty members from any department are welcome to submit a proposal to organize a seminar on a topic related to the institute’s research. For guidelines on submitting a proposal to organize a seminar, please visit here.
Fall 2011 Seminar
Religion and Mobility. Organized by Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology and History, and Valentina Izmirlieva, Professor of Slavic Languages. This yearlong workshop will look at Christian-Muslim interactions in a variety of situations where the faithful are in movement -migrants, traders, pilgrims- while they are setting up a new religious order and to understand how inter-faith relations get sorted out in those situations. In line with the argument of Dionigi Albera who has identified various places, moments, and ways of inter-faith accommodation and sharing in the Mediterranean world, the workshop seeks to construct not only a “moving spiritual map” of conflict and accommodation, but also of portrait of the many forms of cultural and inter-faith exchange and learning that take place. Participants will consider the notion of mobility to be a capacious one that includes various forms and will consider several of these dimensions, perhaps building an initial typology of types of mobility and relations. The following dimensions are key to the studies that we have: physical mobility (as pilgrims, traders, religious figures move in space); status mobility (as mobility that is initiated by the faithful, pilgrims for example, to enhance their status in the home country); identity mobility (shifts in identity, conversions, hybrid identities and practices that emerge as a result of mixing, at pilgrimage sites, sacred sites, etc..) and institutional mobility (the transfer of knowledge and practices across religious institutions).
The seminar will be divided into two distinct semesters: the Fall semester will explore the particularities of the working group’s topics and each participant will present an initial paper that will explore the various dimensions of the project in a closed session. The Spring semester will bring five outside speakers to open the workshop up to public dialogue with discussions of each of the projects and for private workshops.
Multi-Year Faculty Research Groups
The Institute supports the following working groups that bring together faculty members to work on a multi-year interdisciplinary projects.
Toleration Working Group is an interdisciplinary group of faculty members working on three volumes on secularism and toleration, to be published by the Columbia University Press Series.
- A volume by an interdisciplinary group comprised of Columbia faculty including Karen Barkey (Sociology, Columbia), Akeel Bilgrami (Philosophy, Columbia); Ira Katznelson (Political Science and History, Columbia); Sudipta Kaviraj (Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia); Alfred C. Stepan (Political Science, Columbia); Nadia Urbinati (Political Science, Columbia)
- A response to A Secular Age by Charles Taylor on the emergence of secularism within Latin Christendom. The volume asks to what degree is the book’s thesis relevant to non-Christian cultures with chapters on Sufi West Africa by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (French, Columbia), on Latin America by Claudio Lomnitz (Anthropology, Columbia), on the Ottoman Empire by Karen Barkey (Sociology, Columbia); on the Middle East by Timothy Mitchell (MEALAC, Columbia); on China by Peter Van der Veer (Utrecht University); on Indonesia by Alfred Stepan (Political Science, Columbia); on Japan by Ian Buruma (Bard); and on South Asia by Sudipta Kaviraj (Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, Columbia), Akeel Bilgrami (Philosophy, Columbia), and Rajeev Bhargava (Center for the Study of Developing Societies).
- An annotated reader of classic publications concerning debates on religion and toleration based on the conferences “Six Hundred Years of Religious Conflict and Accommodation in India,” organized by Professor Sudipta Kaviraj.