Past Projects

Rajbir Singh Judge.

This two-day workshop, Questions of the Nonhuman: Rethinking Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia, at Columbia University in the City of New York will explore the various linkages between South Asia and the nonhuman. Papers will explore, through a range of methods, how the non-human helps us to grasp the coordinates that structure(d) empire and its afterlives through, what Etienne Balibar (1991) calls, “the systematic ‘bestialization’ of individuals and racialized human groups” (53). Yet, such a reading, as Naisargi Dave (2014) reminds us, could itself be “a sign of humanism’s triumph,” requiring we ask, Dave continues, “is seeing humanism everywhere only a capitulation to its colonization of imagination and thought?” The nonhuman, in other words, is not an invariable proxy for the human nor is the management of men, for example, the sole objective of empire or the postcolonial state. Therefore, papers also consider how centering the non-human undoes the partitions of the “anthropological machine,” centered on divisions between subject/object, sameness/difference, spectator/participant, inclusion/exclusion, by attending to how the nonhuman troubles and, perhaps, even surpasses given forms including our desire for autochthonous ones (Agamben 2002).

Clémence Boulouque, Elizabeth Castelli, and Christia Mercer.

This project has four closely related goals. First, we are concerned to explore how epistemologically disadvantaged people have found means within religious contexts to acquire knowledge and how such knowers question the broader dynamics (or fault lines) between private learning and public life. Second, we intend to offer the first thorough-going account of the innovative ways in which 12th- to 16th-century Christian women navigated the severe restrictions placed on them as knowers, while proposing profound truths about God, the world, and the divine worthiness of all human beings. Third, we will use our new account of medieval women to show that core assumptions about the development of modern philosophy need to be rethought. Finally, we hope to use the lessons learned from our study of medieval women as the beginning of an analysis of later writers.

Hamid Dabashi and Brinkley Messick.

Entailing a pair of conferences and an envisioned edited volume, this project aims to bring together the well-developed literatures on the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the related transnational and global history frameworks to offer new insights into the forces constituting the revolution and shaping its immediate consequences. In so doing, it will situate the uprising that overthrew the monarchy and fashioned an Islamic Republic in relation to transnational intellectual discourses, cold war struggles, anti-colonial movements, religious movements and political economic processes. Our hope and intent is to engage in a generative scholarly conversation on possible modes and registers through which the “global,” “national,” “local,” and “communal” processes intersected and worked together to make the Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic – a key modern religious upheaval and the resulting state – possible. This project is a scholarly collaboration led by faculty at Columbia and NYU.

Katherine Ewing and Alexander Stille.

IRCPL’s “Life History in Northwest Africa” project is interdisciplinary and draws upon oral history, anthropology and ethnography, religious studies, and journalism. IRCPL researchers collected extended, in-depth, and fine-grained life history narratives over the course of numerous conversations and interviews in Senegal, Mauritania, and Morocco. In doing so, they focus on how individuals live and experience the movements of history and the forms of socio-religious change that help to frame and give meaning to this experience. Crossing traditional regional boundaries between the Maghreb and West Africa, the project prioritizes ordinary people in the “northwest” region to think about the ways in which personal narratives allow for a different, critical reflection upon history, socio-religious change, and contemporary politics.