Islamic Worlds Initiative

Thanks to a generous gift from the family of W. Nathaniel Howell III, the Islamic Worlds Initiative is pleased to offer a new graduate development grant for PhD students to fund and organize their own graduate symposia in their respective fields of study.

The application deadline and implementation time for this grant have been extended.  This means the number of students now eligible has also expanded!

The concept of Islamic Worlds is intended to bring together a broad and humanistic study of the philosophical, artistic, geopolitical, theological, literary, and material/cultural worlds of Muslim peoples across the globe, including the Americas. We also welcome scholars of those non-Muslim cultures, places and peoples that have been shaped by Muslims living among them. Our name signals our distance from both an Area Studies and an Islamic Studies framework to the extent that the former has created regional borders for our inquiry that do not exist on the ground and the latter has tended to sequesters Muslim life into “religion” alone. Instead, we seek an interdisciplinary collective that brings together colleagues from across Grounds, centered in the College of Arts and Sciences, but by no means limited to it, who bring together their collective knowledge to think with and alongside Islamic modes of inquiry, past and present, to grapple with the most pressing issues of our times.