I’m excited to share a quick summary of my conference presentations for the rest of 2022. Like so many of us, I have missed the chance to see colleagues in person. Presenting my paper, “Sharing Siva’s Secret: Translating Svarodaya and Anti-Colonial Knowledge Production,” at our regional AAR in Denver this past March was so much fun, and I was surprised at how inspired I was by the experience. Since that presentation I have committed to writing a book that pulls together a few different threads in my research (hope to have more news to share on that front by the end of the year), and I am working this summer to develop the basic skills needed for a potential digital humanities project that would produce something to help future students of Arabic and Persian paleography (reading manuscripts).
Back to the conferences!
First up - I will be at Fan Expo Denver 2022 (formerly known as Denver Pop Culture Con) doing two presentations on Sunday, July 3rd:
“Hokey Religions” to Reality: Jediism and Fiction-Based Religious Traditions
This is The Way? Depicting Religious Fundamentalism in The Mandalorian
Then I have a bit of a break until late November, when the American Academy of Religion comes to town. My two papers are:
One Breath, Two Aims: Classifying zikr and `ilm-i dam in early-modern Persian encyclopedias (part of a panel titled “Literary Symbols and Cultural Practices of Premodern Sufism: Recent Discoveries,“ sponsored by the Islamic Mysticism unit)
"Ayesha at Last" and "Hana Khan Carries On": Romance Novels and the New Adab of Muslim Self-Representation (part of a panel titled “Regimes of Muslim Subject Formation,” sponsored by the Study of Islam Unit)
Lastly, in what has to be termed a very favorable “conjunction” (astrologers understand :) the Middle Eastern Studies Association is ALSO coming to Denver, and I will be presenting:
“From the Subtle Body to Concrete Results: The “Science of the Breath” (`ilm-i dam) in Early-Modern Persian Occultism” (as part of a broader panel on Islamicate Occult Bodywork)
I will admit, it looks like a lot. A few of the papers overlap a bit with one another, but I am now really using the conferences as a way to motivate myself to keep reading, writing, and thinking. I have found that I benefit from rotating through different projects because it keeps things fresh. Even when I was finishing my dissertation, there were so many different parts to it that I could flow from one to the next as needed (i.e., spend one day making sure those footnotes were formatted properly, then work on translating primary sources another day, and so on). So too with my conference papers - it is so much easier for me to think about my research on using the breath for divination if I also take the time to work on this relatively new project looking at Muslim romance novels. And spending time critically analyzing Star Wars is just too much fun.
As we celebrate the longest day of the year, I look forward to having lots of great conversations with friends and colleagues (both old and new) over the next few months. As always, lots to learn!