BEI Faculty Workshop Grant
CGC|E is happy to announce that three of winners of Blinken European Insititute Faculty Workshop Grants will be bringing their research to Paris. The BEI Faculty Workshop Grants are awarded for European-oriented projects with a social-scientific/humanistic edge and for innovative teaching programs with a European focus. Projects aim to develop innovative Europe-focused curricula, linking faculties in the Arts & Sciences and schools of practice. Columbia Global Centers│Europe serves as a gateway for meeting these goals.
Congratulations to the three selected teams:
Islamic Feminists, Islamist Women, and the Women Between
Lila Abu-Lughod
Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies
Columbia University
Katherine Pratt Ewing
Professor of Religion
Columbia University
Anupama Rao
Associate Professor of History
Barnard College, Columbia University
The project will convene an international working group of experts on feminism, Islamism, and a variety of Muslim communities in Europe and the Middle East to explore the divergences and points of contact between the flourishing work of “Islamic feminists” and the locally appealing political work of those who might best be called “Islamist women.” A pilot project of “Women Creating Change,” a global initiative of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, the organizers hope to pioneer responsible ways of establishing scholarly networks through Columbia’s Global Centers in Paris, Istanbul, and Amman. “Women Creating Change” focuses on the effects on women of contemporary global problems, and the role of women in addressing those problems and devising strategies for political, social, and cultural transformation.
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Religion, Legal Pluralism and Human Rights: European and Transatlantic Perspectives
Jean Cohen
Professor in the Core Curriculum, Political Science
Columbia University
Yasmine Ergas
Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Human Rights
Adjunct Professor, SIPA
Samuel Moyn
Professor of History
Columbia University
The conference addresses the proper place and role of religion in constitutional democracies and in an international human rights regimes. Does the presence of religious symbols and rituals in public and official spaces foster exclusion or inclusion of those who differ? Were the sovereign state to give up its monopoly over public law and yield to demands for jurisdiction by religious authorities over education and personal law (marriage, divorce, sexual morals, etc.), would this expand or undermine the political equality and human rights of citizens? This conference brings together interdisciplinary and geographically diverse scholars and students to examine the European and transatlantic past and present with respect to these issues.
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Shaping the Margins of Europe: Russia/Soviet Union and the Ottoman Empire/Turkey in Transition, 1900–1930
Christine Philliou
Assistant Professor of History
Columbia University
Tarik Cyril Amar
Assistant Professor of History
ColumbiaUniversity
This is a combined project of two workshops and a plenary session, envisioned as the first part of an ongoing working group that will link conflicts and ideas in and around Europe from the early modern to the modern periods. The first workshop, to be held at Columbia, will examine Ottoman legacies in the post-Ottoman world. The second workshop, slated to take place in Paris in July 2012, will have as its aim to compare the ways concepts of Europe were (re-)shaped in and through the conflicts that brought the Soviet Union into being out of the Russian Empire, and the Republic of Turkey out of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the ways ideas of Europe shaped those transformations. The plenary session, immediately following the second workshop, will involve a discussion of the workshop’s themes and means to forge intellectual and practical connections between the Istanbul and Paris Global Centers.
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