Workshop: Archival Abundances and Silences in Islamic Studies, Princeton University, October 2–3, 2026
October 2 - October 3
From the organizers:
Three decades after Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, scholars in the humanities continue to approach archives as a site of possibility. As historian Arlette Farge writes, “The archive’s allure, nonetheless, lives on. The taste for the archives is not a fashion that will go out of style as quickly as it came in.” This conference will examine the enduring significance of archives and archival theory for the study of Islam and Muslim societies.
Following Alan Mikhail’s provocation to view archives as a place of becoming, how can scholars of Islamic Studies imagine the archive as more than a historical, visual, or textual repository? In what ways can we approach tradition as an archive of knowledge? How do archives reproduce existing power structures and racial epistemologies? How can scholars of religion interrogate and disrupt the limits of the archival record? What are the moral and political imperatives for writing histories of the unlettered? How can we attend to the quotidian and the lived experiences of Muslims in the premodern world and today?
The keynote speaker will be Nancy Khalek, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Professor of History at Brown University.
