Islamic Worlds Initiative

UVA’s Islamic Worlds Initiative is a new scholarly collective for faculty and students with specializations and interests in Islam and Muslim communities, broadly construed.  

 

With membership representing departments as varied as History, Religious Studies, MESALC, Anthropology, Women, Gender & Sexuality, African American and African Studies, Media Studies, Art History, and the School of Architecture, we recognize the urgent need to cultivate interdisciplinary and global research agendas not limited strictly to either Islamic Studies or Area Studies frameworks.  

 

Determined to avoid sequestering Muslim life either regionally into borders that do not exist on the ground, or conceptually into “religion” alone, we are committed to producing research that thinks both with and about perspectives from Muslim cultures and those in conversation with them.  We view such scholarship as equally suited to offer new vantage points on questions of timeless relevance to the humanities, arts and social sciences, and to the most pressing issues of our times.