Islamic Worlds Initiative
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The 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.
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Bazm is Back
Student Programming for Fall '26
Are you a student studying or curious about topics related to Islamic and Muslim topics at UVA? Our Bazm (= Persian "banquet") social hours and working lunches are a perfect way to find your cohort across departments and disciplines!
We meet weekly for coffee hours and working lunches organized and directed solely by student members of the Islamic Worlds Initiative.
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Deadline Extended/New Eligibility: Graduate Symposia Grants
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 [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture](/sites/uva-as-islamicworldsinitiative/files/styles/publication_crop_180x250_/public/2023-10/the-european_0.jpg?itok=gYoseR3J)
