 |
Biography
Ph.D., Columbia University, expected 2010; Certificate in Women’s Studies, Columbia University 2006; M.Phil. Columbia University, 2006; M.A. Graduate Theological Union, 2002; B.A. Bethany College, 1998
Rosemary R. Hicks is a PhD candidate in the North American Religions subfield of the Religion Department. She specializes in Islam in North America and conceptual histories of mysticism, pluralism, and religious liberalism. Her MA thesis focused on women’s religious movements of the nineteenth century and debates over feminism. Her dissertation, “Creating an ‘Abrahamic America’: Cold War Political Economy, Pluralism, and Cosmopolitan Sufi Muslims in New York After 2001,” is an ethno-history dealing with how a particular organization defined American Muslim identity in the midst of changing poltiical and economic circumstances and in relation to disagreements over secularism, multiculturalism, and issues of gender and sexuality. She charts specific twentieth-century academic and inter-religious endeavors involving Islam so as to discuss how these histories relate to the dynamics observed in her ethnography. More precisely, Rosemary highlights changes in how Americans conceptualized Islam and Islamic mysticism during the Cold War era, developed academic and political networks for studying (sometimes mystical) Islam then and after, and how particular figures (Muslim and non-Muslim) narrated and negotiated these historical developments as they engaged in educating international audiences about “American Islam” after 2001.
In addition to teaching at Columbia and New York University, Rosemary's related work has involved research into how various groups define American identity and respond to increased religious and ethnic diversity by forming alliances around human rights and/or appealing to liberal and neo-liberal frameworks for structuring relations between religion and political-economy. She has organized two conferences devoted to examining theoretical and methodological issues in the study of religion, organized panels for and presented at both national and international conferences, and published in The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (2004), Comparative Islamic Studies (2006), American Quarterly (2007), and other venues.
| |
