LUCIS Annual Conference

On 14 and 15 November, the LUCIS Annual Conference took place in Leiden. This year’s LUCIS conference Approaching Shiʿi Islam in the Academy was perhaps the first conference in the Netherlands to focus specifically on the academic study of Shii Islam

The primary objective of this conference was to enrich conversations between scholars of Shiʿism and to demonstrate the relevance of Shiʿi themes to broader conversations in Islamic studies.

The conference brought together leading specialists and emerging scholarly voices in the study of Shiʿi Islam in Europe and North America. In convening this conference, LUCIS encouraged the consideration of all branches of Shiʿi Islam including strands of thought and practice that have been considered heterodox by some Shiʿi traditions, as well as Shiʿi modes of thought and comportment within purportedly non-Shiʿi expressions of Islam.

The conference was followed by a one-day early-career workshop entitled “Shiʿi Piety: Theory and Materiality from Premodern to Postmodern”.

The keynote was delivered by Professor Robert Gleave from the University of Exeter on the Shiʿi Contributions to the Formation of Islamic law. Gleave demonstrated how Shiʿi material can help fill in some important gaps in our history of early Islamic intellectual formation, particularly in the field of Islamic legal studies.

Other speakers were Ab de Jong (Leiden University) “Domesticating Shiʿi Islam: Notes from an Outsider”, Mirjam Künkler (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study) “Female Religious Authority in Shiʿi Islam”, Deborah Tor (University of Notre Dame) “The Integrality of Shiʿism to the Study of the History of the Classical Sunni Caliphate”, Edmund Hayes (Leiden University) “the Shi’a Hadith Corpora” …

Source: Leiden University