Monday, May 5
A Symposium in honor of Katherine Pratt Ewing
Time: 1:15pm – 6:00pm, followed by a reception
Location: Room 207 Knox (1:30pm – 3:00pm), Room 208 (3:00pm – 6:00pm), 606 West 122 Street between Broadway and Claremont
1:15pm - 1:30pm Introduction by Verena Meyer
1:30pm-3:00pm: Session 1
Panel 1: “Ethnographic Method: Revealing and Concealing”
Speakers: Fatima-Ezzahrae Touilila, Attiya Ahmad, David Silverberg, Gaurika Mehta
Panel 2: "Bodies: Embodied Metaphor”
Speakers: Ilona Gerbakher, Anwesha Sengupta, Manpreet Kaur
3:00pm-3:15pm: Coffee Break
3:15pm-4:45pm: Session 2
Panel 3: “(Dis-)Enchantment: Arguing Sainthood”
Speakers: Rohini Shukla, Rajbir Singh Judge, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Verena Meyer
Panel 4: “An Anthropologist in Religious Studies”
Speakers: Zehra Mehdi, Jack Hawley, Ebad Rahman, Rachel McDermott, Quinn Clark
4:45pm-5:00pm: Coffee Break
5:00pm-6:00pm: Keynote by Katherine Pratt Ewing, "Dreaming Selves, Illusions of Wholeness, and the Ethical Subject"
6:00pm-7:00pm: Dinner Reception
Katherine Pratt Ewing (PhD, University of Chicago) is Professor Emerita of Religion at Columbia University and Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She was Director of Columbia’s South Asia Institute before her retirement in 2024 and previously served as director of Columbia’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. In recent years, she has received grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Global Religion Research Initiative (Temple Religion Trust), The American Academy of Religion, The American Council of learned Societies, the Alliance Joint Projects Program, Columbia University President's Global Innovation Fund, and held a fellowship at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination. Among her books are Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Islam (Duke), which focused on debates about Sufism and Islamic reform in Pakistan; Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslims Men in Berlin (Stanford); and Sufis and the State: The Politics of Islam in South Asia and Beyond (Columbia), edited with Rosemary Corbett. She is currently completing a book manuscript, “The Other Within: Gender Ambiguity and Transition among Bengal’s Cultural Elite.”
