RAMON HARVEY received his PhD in Islamic Studies from SOAS, University of London and is currently Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Ebrahim College in London and Visiting Lecturer at the Cambridge Muslim College. He regularly presents his research at national and international academic conferences and has published articles on canonical and variant Qur’anic qirāʾāt. Dr Harvey’s first book entitled The Qur’an and the Just Society is due for publication by Edinburgh University Press in 2017. His current research interests are in Islamic philosophical theology, ethics and political theory.
XIAOFEI TU is a lecturer in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Appalachian State University. He received Master’s degrees from Harvard and Yale Universities and a Doctoral degree in Comparative Religion from Syracuse University. His research interests include 20th century Asian religions and philosophy and the reception of Asian religions in the United States.
MONIR BIROUK is a high school Moroccan teacher. He holds a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature in 2012, and he is currently a Ph.D candidate in the doctoral programme “Language, Culture and Society” at the University of Mohammed V in Rabat. Birouk also worked as a part-time teacher assistant at Ibn Zohr University in Agadir. He is interested in the dialectic between ethics, religion and modernity, and he participated in a couple of academic events in Morocco and abroad. Monir Birouk published a couple of articles in international journals, in US and Canada respectively.
DANIEL TUTT is a philosopher, filmmaker and lecturer at Marymount University. His research and writing is concerned with Marxism and post-Marxist thought, contemporary social and political movements, Islamic thought, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of history. His forthcoming book is entitled Unstable Formations: Political Community in Contemporary Theory. His writing has been published in Philosophy Now, the Washington Post, and Crisis and Critique, among other publications.
SAMANEH OLADI received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Oladi is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of World Studies, Religious Studies program, at Virginia Commonwealth University. She specializes in Islamic jurisprudence and family law, Middle East, and women’s studies. Dr. Oladi’s research and teaching interests range across various areas including Islamic mysticism, and contemporary religious movements. Dr. Oladi’s current research looks at the evolving roles of women as religious authorities and producers of Islamic knowledge, addressing how their scholarship challenges patriarchal interpretations of sacred scriptures. Dr. Oladi is currently working on a manuscript that looks at Muslim women’s religious activism and its impact on bridging the gap between Islamic jurisprudence and gender justice in the realm of Islamic Family Law.
SAID F. HASSAN currently teaches at al-Azhar University, Faculty of Languages and Translation, Islamic Studies Department. He received his PhD in the field of Islamic Law from UCLA in 2011. He has been a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown University, 2012; a visiting fellow at Institute for Islamic Studies (IAIN) Sultan Maulana Hasanuddin, Indonesia, 2014; a visiting fellow at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Freie Universitate, Berlin, summer 2014. His research focuses on the transformations of Islamic Law and theology in the modern Muslim world. His publications include Fiqh al-Aqalliyyat: History, development and Progress, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013 and “Law-Abiding Citizen: Recent Fatwas on Muslim Minorities’ Loyalty to Western Nations,” in Journal of the Muslim World, October 2015. He contributed a number of chapters to edited volumes such as Education and the Arab Spring: Shifting Toward Democracy, 2016, Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, 2016, The Encyclopedia of Muslim American History, 2010.
JAMILA DAVEY is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin working in classical Islamic textual tradition, early Islamic history, Francophone studies and gender studies. Before commencing her Ph.D. program Jamila earned a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Northwestern University. Jamila’s research focuses on literary approaches to the study of classical Islamic textual tradition and twentieth- and twenty-first-century re-readings of the Islamic past. Examining discourses on gender and sexuality in Islamic contexts and foregrounding female voices in early textual tradition are also central concerns. A second broad trajectory of Jamila’s research explores how theoretical perspectives travel between the classical Arabo-Islamic context and modern Arabic, Francophone and World literary traditions. As part of this project she engages classical lenses as a form of intertextuality in a wider project of textual interpretation.