BOĞAZİÇİ UNIVERSITY TO HOST SCHOLAR OF SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY PROF. SABA MAHMOOD

Boğaziçi Lectures Series is hosting Prof. Saba Mahmood, a distinguished anthropologist who teaches at The University of California, Berkeley and whose work focuses on religious and secular politics, ethics, gender and sexuality.

Saba Mahmood whose special interests include religion, secularism, law and politics, gender and sexuality, Islam, Middle East and Europe, is one of the leading academic scholars of social and cultural anthropology. Her work focuses on the interchange between religious and secular politics in postcolonial societies emphasizing on the issues of embodiment, cultural hermeneutics, law and gender/sexuality and raises challenging questions about the relationship between ethics and politics, freedom and captivity, religion and secularism, agency and submission.Boğaziçi University has been inviting notable scholars from around the world to participate in Boğaziçi Lectures Series since 2013. The University will host Prof. Saba Mahmood on Monday October 19th 2015. The title of the lecture is “Minority Rights, Geopolitics and Secular Governance”.

About Prof. Saba Mahmood:

Prof. Saba Mahmood received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. She holds professional degrees in architecture and urban planning and worked in these fields before pursuing Anthropology.

She is the author of “Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject” which was awarded The 2005 Victoria Schuck prize for the best book on women and politics from The American Political Science Association, and Honorable Mention for the 2005 Albert Hourani Best Book award from Middle East Studies Association. Her work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Journal of Comparative Literature, Social Research, American Ethnologist, Public Culture. Her book “Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech” which she co-authored with Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown, confronts the issues attending the stand-off between Islam and liberal democratic values.

Prof. Mahmood teaches graduate courses on secularism, ethics and politics, religion and body, human rights and sovereignty, modern religious hermeneutics and modern anthropological theory. Her undergraduate courses include Sexuality and Gender, Anthropology of The Middle East and Islam, Anthropology of Religion, Ethnographic Research and Methodology and History of Anthropological Thought.

She has received numerous awards, fellowships and grants from various institutions including an Honorary Doctorate from University of Uppsala, Sweden in 2013.

Prof. Mahmood is fluent in English, Arabic and Urdu.

October 19, 2015 16:00

Rectorate Conference Hall