We currently run a fully online reading group that meets once or twice per month. Like our membership, the texts we read and discuss come from a variety of fields and take diverse approaches to the study of Jews and Muslims and their intersections. Please ensure you register in advance at the links given below. All are welcome!
Upcoming Sessions
May 19, 2021, 4–5 pm (GMT+1) / 11 am–12 pm (ET)
Facilitator: Re’ee Hagay
Readings: Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s “A National Colonial Theology: Religion, Orientalism, and the Construction of the Secular in Zionist discourse” (2002), and chapter 1 of Anand Vivek Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (2017)
Register here
Past Sessions
April 14, 2021, 4–5 pm (GMT+1) / 11 am–12 pm (ET)
Facilitator: Yovanka Paquete Perdigão
Readings: Yovanka Paquete Perdigão and Henry Brefo’s “The Lion’s Story” (2019), Tobias Warner’s “How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique” (2016), Sada Malumfashi’s “Zata Iya: A History of Hausa Feminist Writings” (2019) and optionally Novian Whitsitt’s “Islamic-Hausa Feminism Meets Northern Nigerian Romance: The Cautious Rebellion of Bilkisu Funtuwa” (2003)
March 4, 2021, 4–5 pm (GMT) / 11 am–12 pm (ET)
Facilitators: Angy Cohen and Yuval Evri
Readings: Chapter 10 of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (2011) and Albert Memmi’s “Negritude and Judeity” (1968)
February 10, 2021, 4–5 pm (GMT)
Facilitators: Katharine Halls & Alaa Murad
Readings: Chapter 1 of Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018) and S.J. Pearce’s “The Inquisitor and the Moseret: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages and the New English Colonialism in Jewish Historiography” (2020)
November 11, 2020, 4–5 pm (GMT)
Facilitator: Alaa Murad
Readings: Chapters 2 & 4 (and optionally also the introduction) of Ross Brann’s Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain (2002)
October 15, 2020, 4–5 pm (GMT+1)
Facilitator: Zoë Roth
Readings: Derrick A. Bell’s “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” (1995), Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989), and W. J. T. Mitchell’s “The Moment of Theory: Race as Myth and Medium” in Seeing Through Race (2012)
September 30, 2020, 4–5 pm (GMT+1)
Facilitator: Sarah Johnson
Readings: Chapters 2 & 5 of Yoav Di-Capua’s No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (2018) and Aline Schlaepfer’s “Between Cultural and National Nahḍa: Jewish Intellectuals in Baghdad and the Nation-Building Process in Iraq (1921-1932)” (2011)
August 27, 2020, 4–5 pm (GMT+1)
Facilitator: Robert Kanter
Readings: Marc David Baer’s “Muslim Encounters with Nazism and the Holocaust: The Ahmadi of Berlin and Jewish Convert to Islam Hugo Marcus” (2015) and Chapter 3 of German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus (2020)
July 16, 2020, 4–5 pm (GMT+1)
Facilitator: Flora Hastings
Readings: Chapter 3 of Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar’s Spain Unmoored (2017) and Erica Lehrer’s “Virtual, Virtuous, Vicarious, Vacuous? Towards a Vigilant Use of Labels” (2014)
June 4, 2020, 4–5 pm (GMT+1)
Facilitator: Adi Saleem Bharat
Readings: Ali Meghji and Rima Saini’s “Rationalising Racial Inequality: Ideology, Hegemony and Post-Racialism among the Black and South Asian Middle-Classes” (2018) and Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry’s “Is the Radical Critique of Merit Anti-Semitic?” (1995)
May 14, 2020, 4–5 pm (GMT+1)
Facilitator: Katharine Halls & Flora Hastings
Readings: Chapter 1 of Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam? (2015) and Chapter 1 of Daniel Boyarin’s Judaism (2019)
London — March 4, 5–6.30 pm
Facilitator: Flora Hastings & Katharine Halls
Readings: Chapter 1 of Aaron Hughes’s Shared Identities and Gil Anidjar’s ‘Muslim Jews.’
Location: MayDay Rooms, 88 Fleet St, London EC4Y 1DH
Manchester – February 28, 2020, 1–2pm
Facilitator: Adi S. Bharat
Readings: Introduction and Chapter 1 of Aaron Hughes’ Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (2017).
Location: Room S1.37, Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester
Manchester — December 6, 2019, 12:30–2 pm
Facilitator: Zainab Salloo
Readings: Simon Weaver’s “A rhetorical discourse analysis of online anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic jokes” (2013) and Adi S. Bharat’s “Shalom alikoum! Challenging the conflictual model of Jewish-Muslim relations in France through stand-up comedy” (2020).
Location: WG.21, Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester
Manchester — November 22, 2019, 12:30–2 pm
Facilitator: Adi S. Bharat
Readings: David J. Wertheim’s “The Price of an Entrance Ticket to Western Society: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heinrich Heine and the Double Standard of Emancipation” (2017).
Location: WG.21, Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester
Manchester — October 11, 2019, 12:30–2 pm
Facilitator: Robert Kanter
Readings: Susannah Heschel’s “Orientalist triangulations” (2019).
Location: WG.21, Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester
Manchester — September 27, 2019, 1–2 pm
Facilitator: Michael Miller
Readings: Ethan Michaeli’s “Another Exodus: The Hebrew Israelites from Chicago to Dimona” (1999) and Martina Könighofer’s “Israelites and Ishmaelites” (2008).
Location: S3.24, Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester
Manchester — June 7, 2019, 12:30–2 pm
Facilitators: Adi S. Bharat & Katharine Halls
Readings: Introduction and Chapter 4 of Yulia Egorova’s Jews and Muslims in South Asia (2018).
Location: WG.21, Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester
Manchester — May 10, 2019, 12:30–2 pm
Facilitators: Adi S. Bharat & Katharine Halls
Readings: Gil Z. Hochberg’s “‘Remembering Semitism’ or ‘On the Prospect of Re-Membering the Semites’” (2016) and chapter one of Amartya Sen’s Identity & Violence (2006).
Location: WG.21, Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester
