ISGRJ Race and Religion Lecture Series: Global Circuits of Difference with Dr. Madina Thiam

The Race and Religion series at ISGRJ-Newark seeks to center conversations about the intersections of race and religion, and the racialization of religion, from historical and contemporary perspectives, in the U.S. and globally. As categories of identity and identification, race and religion have historically overlapped and competed as primary forms of differentiation and markers of difference.

This Winter/Spring the series will focus on Islam in Africa. One of the consequences of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was that West African Muslims preceded much of the rest of the Muslim world in their confrontation with imperial power, market economies, and the moral questions they engendered. Later European colonization and the subsequent process of decolonization, and the tensions between discriminating hierarchies of race and the moral commitments of religion, conditioned conflicting ways of imagining community and group membership.

The first lecture of the series, held on February 14, 2024, featured Dr. Madina Thiam, Assistant Professor of History at New York University.

Watch the lecture here:

About the Featured Speaker:

Madina Thiam is a historian of West Africa. Her research and teaching explore the circulations of people and ideas in and out of Mali and the Sahel; the social history of Islam; decolonization and pan-Africanism. She has published in various outlets, including the Journal of African History, the CODESRIA Bulletin, and the edited volume She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped The World. She holds a PhD in African History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently an Assistant Professor of History at New York University. She is also a co-director of the Bamako-based Project Archives des Femmes, a digital archive of Malian women's anti-colonial struggles and post-colonial activism.