April 18, 2025 to April 25, 2025
Time:
9:30 AM
The 2025 Annual Conference of the Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS will focus on Islam and society in historical and contemporary South Asia.
In a spirit of reimagining the past and present, we invite submissions that contribute to a richer understanding of the variety of Islamic traditions and their lived expressions in South Asia, as well as the relationships between Islam and other religious traditions and their followers. Submissions may be historical, ethnographic, or from other disciplinary perspectives in the humanities and social sciences. We are particularly interested in explorations of what it means to construct religious traditions as objects of study.
The study of Islamic traditions represents significant domains of scholarly intervention. Over recent decades, scholars from various disciplines have increasingly come to question orientalist assumptions about the vitality and creativity of religious traditions, often interrogating the usefulness of the category of religion. Research on post-classical Islam has noted significant and subtle ways in which these traditions have changed, creatively responding to developing intellectual, societal, and existential concerns. Such research has also turned to the complex interactions and intersections between different religious traditions in South Asia, across multiple languages and contexts. Finally, scholars have investigated the myriad ways in which premodern traditions interacted with colonial modernity and continue to do so in the post-colonial context. Nonetheless, the extent, significance, and shape of these processes remain up for debate and further inquiry.
