Sponsored by:
- Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL)
- The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR)
- The Center for the Study of Human Rights (CSHR)
- Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR), Salzburg
Co-organizers:
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Prof. Elazar Barkan, Columbia University
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Dr. Yitzhak Reiter, Hebrew University
Short Biographies
Sharing Sacred Space:
Religion and Conflict Resolution
Columbia University, New York
International Affairs Building, Room 1501
February 14-15, 2008
The conference “Sharing Sacred Space: Religion and Conflict Resolution” intends to focus on the role of sites and spaces that are significant to more than one religion and on the ways these religions engage each other in order to overcome and resolve conflict. The goal is to illuminate a pioneering approach for promoting toleration through religious processes that engage and respect the narrative and beliefs of the Other, be it religious or ethnic groups.
Elazar Barkan
Professor Barkan received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Comparative European History in 1988. He graduated with magna cum laude with a B.A. in Modern European History from Tel Aviv University in 1980. Since 2003 he has served as the Director for the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation [IHJR] for the Salzburg Seminar supported by ‘The Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs’. He was also involved with the ‘Institute for the Study and Preservation of Local Cultures’ (ISPLC) from 1996 to 2002. His research interests include: Human Rights; Post Conflict Societites (Reparation and Transitional Justice); Cultural property; history of imperialism and colonialism; Cultural and intellectual history post 1850; race and racism; primitivism and modernism.
Barkan has published numerous books which include: Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation; an edited volume with Alexander Karn, (Stanford University Press 2006, Forthcoming); Claiming the Stones/Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity (Issues & Debates), an edited volume with Ronald Bush (Getty, 2003); The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Norton, May 2000); Völker klagen an. Eine neue internationale Moral. (Patmos Verlag March 2002); Borders, Exiles and Diasporas, an edited volume with Marie Denise Shelton (Stanford University Press, 1998); Prehistories of the Future: Primitivism, Modernism, and Politics, an edited volume with Ronald Bush (Stanford University Press, 1995); The Retreat of Scientific Racism (Cambridge University Press, 1992); and was the editor of the series Cultural Sitings (1993-), (Stanford University Press).
Yitzhak Reiter
Yitzhak Reiter is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science – Ashkelon Academic College and a lecturer on Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His fields of expertise are modern history of the Middle East with a special focus on Jordan and Palestine, the Arabs in Israel, Islamic institutions and politics of the holy places. Dr. Yitzhak Reiter served as the Deputy Advisor on Arab Affairs to the Israeli Prime Minister (from PM Menachem Begin to PM Shimon Peres) between 1978-1986. He is also a fellow of both the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. He is the author of several books, among them are: Islamic Endowment in Jerusalem under British Mandate; and Islamic Institutions in Jerusalem: Palestinian Muslim Administration under Jordanian and Israeli Rule. Forthcoming in 2008 are: Jerusalem and its Role in Islamic Solidarity (Palgrave Macmillan) and National Minority, Regional Majority: Palestinian Arabs versus Jews in Israel (Syracuse University Press.
Yusuf Natsheh
Yusuf Said Natsheh is a Palestinian who was born and lives in Jerusalem. He was educated in Jerusalem, Cairo and London, where he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of London, School of Oriental and African studies (SOAS) in 1997. Since completing his doctoral studies, Natsheh has directed the Department of Islamic Archaeology in al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem and has been a lecturer at al-Quds University, where he has supervised many M. A. thesis and educated B.A students. From 1983-1992 he also taught at Berzeit University and other Palestinian Universities as a part time lecturer. Dr Natsheh is a council member of many palestinian societies interested in architectural heritage and is a consultant for various projects concerning Jerusalem. He has written books and more than 40 articles about Jerusalem architectural heritage - including an architectural survey of the Ottoman architecture, which was published in Ottoman Jerusalem: the Living City, London 2000 - and has contributed to many international and national workshops, symposiums, and conferences. Finally, Dr Natsheh was entrusted to supervise the restoration project of the Mamluk monuments in and around the al-Haram al-Sharif, sponsored by the Arab League, and was nominated the local Palestinian expert for the UNESCO mission to Jerusalem in Feb-March.
Raphael Greenberg
Raphael Greenberg came to Jerusalem in 1970 and participated, first as a volunteer and then as a staff member, in the Temple Mount and City of David excavations. Between 1985 and 2000 he served as Senior Editor of the Israel Antiquities Authority publications. He has been teaching archaeology at Tel Aviv University since 1998, where he is a Senior Lecturer. His current projects include the Tel Bet Yerah Research and Excavation Project (since 2001); the Rogem Gannim (West Jerusalem) Project in Community Archaeology (since 2000); and the West Bank and East Jerusalem Archaeological Database Project (since 2005). He has lectured and published extensively on the archaeology of Israel, covering issues that range from the early urbanization of the 3rd millennium BCE Levant to the political economy of Jerusalem in the Iron Age, and from the evaluation of Israeli public archaeological policy to the history of excavations in Jerusalem since 1967. His most recent publication is entitled “The Present Past of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict: Israeli Archaeology in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967.” He presently lives with his family in the ‘Ir Gannim neighborhood in west Jerusalem.
Nazmi Jubeh
Nazmi Jubeh, PhD (b. Jerusalem, 1955) is the Co-Director of Riwaq, Centre for Architectural Conservation and a lecturer in the Department of History, Birzeit University and al-Quds University. Jubeh’s research melds archeology, history, politics and architecture. He completed initial studies in Middle Eastern Studies and archaeologies at Birzeit University and received both a Masters degree in oriental studies and archeology and a PhD in archeology and history from the University of Tubingen in Germany. From 1991 to 1993 he was a member of the Palestinian delegation to the Bilateral Peace Negotiations in Washington DC and from 1997 to 1999 he was the Chairman of the Department of History at Birzeit University. Jubeh is well known for his expertise on Jerusalem in general and the holy sites in particular and serves as an advisor to the Palestinian Authority on Jerusalem. Jubeh also currently serves on the board of trustees of several cultural institutions in Jerusalem. He published several books and a large number of articles on history, archaeology, politics and architecture.
Anna Bigelow
Anna Bigelow joined the faculty in Philosophy & Religion at NCSU in fall 2004 as Assistant Professor. She received her MA from Columbia University and PhD in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara where her focus was on South Asian Islam. Her dissertation “Sharing Saints, Shrines, and Stories: Practicing Pluralism in North India,” won an award for best dissertation from the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB. Her book project Sharing the Sacred, under advance contract with Oxford University Press, is a study of a Muslim majority community in Indian Punjab and the shared sacred and civic spaces in that community. Her research agenda involves further study of contested and cooperatively patronized multi-religious sacred sites and the inter-religious dynamics which complicate or ameliorate these relations in plural communities. She has also spoken frequently on religious extremism, religion and conflict, and the role of Islam in the modern world.
Hilal Ahmed
Hilal Ahmed received his PhD in 2007 from the Department of Political and International Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The title of his dissertation is “Politics of Monuments and Memory in Postcolonial North India: A Study of Muslim Political Discourse on Jama Masjid and Babri Masjid”. (The research project was fully funded by the Ford Foundation International Fellowships in which he analyzed the process of monumentalisation in colonial and postcolonial India- the process by which a historic building is converted into a monument of a nation or a community - as a vantage point to understand the changing nature of Muslim political discourse in postcolonial India. Being an ethnographic study of Muslim politics, this research is based on a critical analysis of colonial and postcolonial archaeological/legal sources and qualitative data collected during the extensive fieldwork in Ayodhya, Delhi and other north Indian cities. (See Appendix 1 for the summary of this research). He published a number of articles in scientific journal dealing with his field of research.
Sufia M. Uddin
Suffia Uddin is currently in the Department of Religious Studies at Connecticut College.
Her book, Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation, was published by UNC Press in 2006. Some of her other publications include: “Mystical Journey or Misogynist Assault?: Al-Qushayri's Interpretation of Zulaikha's Attempted Seduction of Yusuf” in the Journal of Islamic Studies; “In the Company of Pirs: Making Vows, Seeking Favors at Bangladeshi Sufi Shrines” in Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia, edited by William Harman and Selwa Raj; and “Beyond National Borders and Religious Boundaries” forthcoming in Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances, edited by Peter Gottschalk and Matthew Schmalz.
Aomar Boum
Aomar Boum is Assistant Professor of International Studies and Islamic Studies at Portland State University. He received his PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2006, his M.A. in Applied Humanities from Al-Akhawayn University (Morocco) in 1997, and his B.A. in English Language and Literature from Cadi Ayyad University (Morocco) in 1993. His Dissertation was titled Muslims Remember Jews in Southern Morocco: Social Memories, Dialogic Narratives, and the Collective Imagination of Jewishness. Professor Boum is the recipient of such awards. He spent last summer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as Judith B. and Burton P. Resnick Fellow for the Study of Anti-Semitism. He was also a recipient of the Charles and Gertrude Gordon Foundation Fellowship and Jack and Irene Sarver Scholarship from The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies; Centre d'Etudes Maghrebines de Tunis/Tangier American Legation Museum Fellowship for Maghrebi Scholars; Tauber Institute Graduate Research Award; UCLA-Maurice Amado Foundation Research Grant; Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Professor Boum has published a number of academic papers on ethnic folkdances and nationalism, al-Jazeera and the discourse on terrorism, national politics and education, as well as on the history and historiography of rural Moroccan Jewry. Boum co-authored the Historical Dictionary of Morocco (Scarecrow Press, 2006) with Dr. Thomas Park. He has also written a number of encyclopedic entries on the Jews of southern Morocco for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Brill) and the Modern Encyclopedia of the Middle East. His work in progress includes Jewish representation in Moroccan Museums and Berber-Jewish discourse in Morocco. He is also work on a manuscript entitled Moroccan Memories: The Transformation of Muslim Attitudes Toward a Jewish Minority.
André Levy
André Levy completed his doctoral studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996. He has done his doctoral research in anthropology on the dwindling of the Jewish community in contemporary Casablanca. His main bulk of writing, stemming from this anthropological fieldwork, focuses on Jewish-Muslim relationships in Morocco and these relationships are examined within the ontological and epistemological framework of diaspora. André also has conducted research with Dr. Sara Helman on Shas’ educational system and on the construction of the Negev as a peripheral space with Dr. Oriel Sullivan. André is interested in the theoretical issues of pilgrimages, identity politics, ethnicity, nation-state, and diasporas. He is a senior lecturer at the Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University and is the co-editor with Alex Weingrod André of: “On Homelands and Diasporas: Holy Lands and Other Places” (Stanford University Press).
Tommy Christomy
Dr. Tommy Christomy is a lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities University of Indonesia. Between 2004 and 2007 he was an Associate Professor, Malay-Indonesian Dept, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul. He coordinated a Collaborative Research on People Experiences during the Japanese Occupation in Southeast Asia and East Asia supported by Toyota Foundation Initiative Grant (2005-2007). His publications include: “Some notes on Pamijahan’s Manuscripts”, SARI 25 (2007) 241-254; “Literary Propaganda during the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia,” ASIA: Magazine of Asian Literature, 1/31 Winter 2006; Rethingking Philological Task: The Case of Babad Pamidjahan. In Kesusasteraan Tradisional Asia Tenggara, edited by Z. Ajamain. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (2005); The Metaphor of Origin in West Java: a semiotic approach. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14 (2) (2005):217—258; Shattariyah Tradition in West Java. Studia Islamika: Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies 8 (Number 2, 2001).
Sukidi
Sukidi earned his B.A. with Honors at the State Institute for Islamic Studies (IAIN), Jakarta (1998), and his first M.A. with distinction in Southeast Asian religions and Middle Eastern Studies, Ohio University, Athens, America, (2002-2004). He received his second Masters in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School (2004-2006) and is now pursuing his PhD program in the Study of Islam at Harvard University. In addition to his years of civic and theological engagement in such Islamic modernist organizations as Paramadina and Muhammadiyah, Sukidi has devoted his intellectual career to writing hundreds of articles and columns in the Indonesian national newspapers. His scholarly works have been published in the Indonesian language, i.e., New Age: Spiritual Adventure beyond Religion, (Jakarta: Gramedia, 2001, second edition); Inclusive Theology of Cak Nur (Nurcholish Madjid), (Jakarta: Kompas Publisher, 2001, third edition); and Spiritual Quotient [SQ]: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ and EQ, (Jakarta: Gramedia, 2002, second edition). Sukidi has also published a number of academic articles in various scholarly journals.
Glenn Bowman
Glenn Bowman's doctoral field research was carried out on the topic of Christian pilgrimage in Jerusalem between 1983 and 1985 and gave rise to further regionally based interests in shrines, monumentalisation, tourism and - with reference to the Palestinian people - nationalism and conflict, diasporic and local identities, and secularist versus sectarian strategies of mobilisation. He has subsequently carried out a longitudinal study of the mixed Christian-Muslim town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, which had played a substantial role in the Palestinian intifada (uprising). At present he is developing comparative work between the Middle East and the Balkans and is working on a project investigating historical and contemporary uses of shared shrines in Macedonia and Israel/Palestine. At Kent, Bowman convenes the MA programme in the Anthropology of Ethnicity, Nationalism and Identity and co-convenes the MA in Visual Anthropology. He is currently Honorary Editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and is on the editorial boards of Critique of Anthropology, Anthropological Theory and Focaal.
Maria Couroucli
Dr. Maria Couroucli is a research fellow at the CNRS, holds a doctoral degree in Social and Historical Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and a BA and MA from Cambridge (UK). Her doctoral research was carried out in Corfu, where she studied an olive-growing village community (Cf. Les oliviers du lignage, Maisonneuve et Larose, Paris 1985). She has conducted further research in Greece on kinship and family, identity and nationalism. Her current research interests include shared religious practices in the post-ottoman world as well as questions of memory and identity in relation to the Greek civil war (1946-49). She teaches in the post-graduate program of the Departement d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie comparative at Nanterre University (Paris, France) and is member of the editorial board of Ethnologie Française.
Dr. Amila Buturovic
Amila Buturovic is Associate Professor of Humanities and a Noor Fellow in Islamic Studies at York University. She works on the intersections between literature and identity, especially in context of Balkan Islam. She is the author of Stone Sleeper: Medieval Tombstones, Landscape, and Bosnian Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar (2002) and co-editor of Women in the Ottoman Balkans (2007). She is currently working on funerary epigraphy and tombstones in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
