Secularism and Religion-Making
Markus Dressler and Arvind Mandair
Author Information
Markus Dressler has published extensively on Turkish Alevism. His further interests include the sociology and politics of Islam in Turkey, nationalist Turkish historiography, and Sufism in the West. Theoretically, his research engages in the work of concepts in the study of religion and Islam, as well as the interaction between religion, secularism, and nationalism.
Arvind-Pal S. Mandair is S.B.S.C. Associate Professor of Sikh Studies at the University of Michigan. His recent books include Religion and the Specter of the West and Teachings of the Sikh Gurus. He is a founding editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture and Theory and Assistant editor of Culture and Religion.
Contributors:
Markus Dressler is a leading expert, and has published extensively on, Turkish Alevism. His further interests include the sociology and politics of Islam in Turkey, nationalist Turkish historiography, and Sufism in the West. Theoretically his research engages in the work of concepts in the study of religion and Islam, as well as the interaction between religion, secularism, and nationalism.
Mark Elmore is an assistant professor in the Religious Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. He is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled, Secular Desires: Governance, Anxiety, and Modern Religion in Postcolonial India.
Brian Goldstone is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, where he is currently a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow and an Honorary Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow.
Rosemary R. Hicks is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University and earned her PhD in North American Religions subfield of the Columbia University Department of Religion with a dissertation titled, "Creating an Abrahamic America and Moderating Islam: Cold War Political Economy and Cosmopolitan Sufis in New York after 2001." A three-time recipient of the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (Lebanon), Hicks was also a 2007-2008 American Fellow with the American Association of University Women and a 2007-2009 Mellon Fellow with the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University.
Greg Johnson is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He studies contemporary indigenous traditions in moments of legal struggle, with specific attention to American Indian and Native Hawaiian contexts. His recent publications include Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition (UVA Press 2007) and "Social Lives of the Dead: Contestations and Continuities in Native Hawaiian Repatriation Contexts," in Culture and Belonging, edited by Marc Ross (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
Richard King is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow and has published numerous books and articles on classical Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and postcolonial theory and religion. He is the author of Early Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism (1995), Orientalism and Religion (1999), Indian Philosophy (1999) and Selling Spirituality (2004, with Jeremy Carrette). He is currently editing a multi-authored introduction to classical and contemporary theories of religion for Columbia University Press and a monograph on apophatic mysticism in comparative perspective.
Arvind Mandair teaches at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on South Asian Religions and Culture with a specialization on Sikhism. His research interests also include continental and comparative philosophy; Postcoloniality; Theories of Religion and the Secular; and Translation. He is a founding co-editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture and Theory and Assistant Editor of the journal Culture and Religion, both published by Routledge. He also serves on the international advisory board of the journal Religions of South Asia.
Ruth Mas is an Assistant Professor of Critical Theory and Contemporary Islam at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She was a 2009-2010 Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, a 2008-2009 Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities and the Arts at CU-Boulder, and a 2003-2004 Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany. Ruth Mas's research interests lie in the intersection between French secularism and contemporary Islamic thought.
Kerry Mitchell is Assistant Professor and Director of Academic Affairs and Comparative Religion at the Global College, Long Island University. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in the study of religion in America.
Michael Nijhawan is Associate Professor in Sociology at York University in Toronto. His work focuses on cultural practices, violence, suffering and the politics of religion and secularism with a specific focus on Sikh and Ahmadiyya transnational religious communities. He is author of Dhadi Darbar. Religion, Violence, and the Performance of Sikh History (Oxford University Press, 2006) and has co-edited Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia (Routledge, 2009).
Alicia Turner is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at York University in Toronto. She specializes in the study of Buddhism in Southeast Asia with an emphasis on the period of British colonialism in Burma/Myanmar and the intersections of religion, colonialism and nationalism. She is also the editor of The Journal of Burma Studies.
