The Alwaleed Bin Talal Seminar in Islamic Studies brings experts from an array of fields within the field of Islamic studies to Harvard. These seminars are meant to bolster intellectual engagement within the field of Islamic studies more broadly on the Harvard campus, and to allow students to engage with cutting-edge insights and scholarship on Islam and Islamic studies. The seminar series serves as educational opportunity for students, reserchers, and faculty to interact and learn in a seminar-style setting from world class experts on topics ranging from Islamic philosophy, Islamic history, Islamic law, Sufism, Arabic and Qur'anic studies and modern Islamic thought.
Fall 2020
Spring 2020
Wednesday, February 26, 2020 | 12-1:30pm | CGIS South, Room S030 (Lee Gathering Room)
Fall 2019
Gender and Curriculum in the Islamic Studies Classroom
Thursday, September 26th | 4-5:30pm | William James Hall, 1550
Kecia Ali, Professor of Religion, Boston University
Co-sponsors: Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality
Anglo-Persian Texts and the Colonial Understanding of Religion
Thursday, October 24th | 4-5:30pm | William James Hall, 1550
Carl Ernst, William R. Keenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Co-sponsors: The Aga Khan Fund for Iranian Studies
Early Shiite Law and the Construction of the Shari'a
Monday, November 25th | 1-2:30pm | Wasserstein Hall 3016
Robert Gleave, Professor of Arabic Studies, University of Exeter
Co-sponsors: The Law and Religion Lecture Series (The Committee on Study of Religion, The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish & Israeli Law at Harvard Law school, Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School) and Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School
Spring 2019
The Quran in the American Imagination
Zareena Grewal, Associate Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies
Yale University
February 25, 2019
12:00-1:30pm
William James Hall 601
City and Countryside as Understood in Medieval Arabic-Persian Dictionaries
Roy Mottahedeh, Professor Emeritus of History
Harvard University
March 28, 2019
3:00-4:30pm (tentative)
Al-Ghazālī and the Epistemology of Legal Analogy (Qiyās): How Greek Logic Ascertains Islamic Law
Felicitas Opwis, Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies
Georgetown University
Thursday, April 11, 2019
2:00-3:30pm
Race, Religion, and Revolution in Islamic West Africa since 1770
Rudolph Ware, Associate Professor of History
University of California - Santa Barbara
Thursday, May 2, 2019
1:00-2:30pm