The CEU University-Wide Doctoral Seminar Post-Secularism and its Precedents: Religious Counter-discourses to Modernity Public Session Murat Akan(Boğaziçi University)
The Politics of Secularism:
Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey
Thursday,
November 22, 2018
3:30 PMCEU, Nador utca 15Quantum Room (101) Reception to Follow _________________________________
UWC 6000 CEU University-Wide Religious Studies Doctoral Seminar “Post-Secularism and its Precedents: Religious Counter-discourses to Modernity” is a CEU University-Wide Course organized by the Center for Religious Studies and cross-listed by the Departments of Gender Studies, History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology and Social Anthropology. Attendance to this seminar session is open to the public._________________________________
Abstract: Discussions of modernity—or alternative and multiple modernities—often hinge on the question of secularism, especially how it travels outside its original European context. Too often, attempts to answer this question either imagine a universal model derived from the history of Western Europe, which neglects the experience of much of the world, or emphasize a local, non-European context that limits the potential for comparison. In his book, The Politics of Secularism, Murat Akan reframes the question of secularism, exploring its presence both outside and inside Europe and offering a rich empirical account of how it moves across borders and through time.
Murat Akan is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, and Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (2005) from Columbia University, New York. He was a non-residential post-doctoral research fellow with the University of Amsterdam (2009-2012), and a guest researcher in-residence at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (2012-2013). He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Middle East Studies in George Washington University in July and August 2017. He will be a visiting researcher at the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités, CNRS-EPHE-PSL in Paris in December 2018. He has a book from Columbia University Press, The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey. His research articles have appeared in a multitude of prestigious international journals.