On December 7-9, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) held an International Conference entitled “Shii Studies: The State of the Art” organized by Hassan Ansari (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) and Sabine Schmidtke (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton).

The conference was part of a larger endeavor aimed at fostering the scholarly exploration of all aspects of Shiism: the “Shii Studies Research Program”, made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Selected papers of the conference will be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed Shii Studies Review (Brill, Leiden), vol. 3, devoted to the topic “Shii Studies: The State of the Art”.

Conference Program

7 DECEMBER

• Mushegh Asatryan (University of Calgary, Canada), A Medieval Nusayri Shaykh’s Disputations and the Study of the Nusayris in Western Academia
• Samer Traboulsi (University of North Carolina at Asheville), The Past, Present, and Future of Druze Studies
• Shafique N. Virani (University of Toronto), Pir Sabzali and the Missing Sources of Ismaili History
• Jo‐Ann Gross (The College of New Jersey), Documentary Sources on Ismailism in Badakhshan: Genealogical History and the Construction of Confessional Identity in Badakhshan
• Matthew Melvin‐Koushki (University of South Carolina), Occultist Imamophilia in Timurid‐Safavid Iran
• Yaacov Lev (Bar Ilan University), The Uniqueness of the Fatimid State
• Soroush Dabbagh (Unversity of Toronto), Islamic Reform in Contemporary Iran: The Shiite Legacy
• Anne Regourd (University of Copenhagen, ERC Project ‘Islam in the Horn of Africa’), Between the lines: reading the history of papers from early manuscripts in the Glaser collection held in Berlin
• Brinkley Messick (Columbia University), Imamic Governance and Sharīʿa Justice in 20th century Yemen
• Nebil A. Husayn (University of Miami), From Kūfa to Yemen to Baghdad: The Evolution of Zaydī Dialectics on the Imamate
• Deborah Tor (University of Notre Dame), The Parting of Ways Between ʿAlid Shiʿism and ʿAbbāsid Shiʿism in the Wake of the ʿAbbāsid Revolution: A Re‐Examination
• Ulrich Marzolph (Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Göttingen), The Visual Culture of Iranian Twelver‐Shiism in the Qajar Period  

8 DECEMBER

• Dennis Halft (Ben‐Gurion University of the Negev), New Evidence for the History of Iranian Jewry and Imāmī‐Jewish Relations from Shīʿī Manuscript Repositories in Iran
• Ehud Krinis, Ben‐Gurion University of the Negev), Jewish‐Shii Studies: Past Contributions and Future Prospects
• Roy Vilozny (University of Haifa), Levy Billig (1897‐1936): an understudied episode in the history of Shīʽī studies
• Amin Ehteshami (University of California, Berkeley), Al‐Maʾmūn’s Translators: Sectarian Genealogies of the Greco‐ Arabic Translation Movement
• Mathieu Terrier (CNRS, Paris), Historicisation of Shiʿism and Shiʿitisation of History. Forty years of Imami Studies from Henry Corbin to Mohammad Ali Amir‐Moezzi
• Seyed Amir Hossein Asghari (Indiana University), The Contemporary Shīʿa Seminary in Iran: Opponents and Adherents of Philosophy and Sufism
• Torsten Hylén (Dalarna University, Falun, Sweden), Dating versions of the Karbalāʾ story
• Ali Rida Rizek (Georg‐August‐Universität Göttingen), “The disciples of al‐Shaykh”: Imāmī Legal Scholarship after al‐ Ṭūsī (d. 460/1067)
• Aun Hasan Ali (University of Colorado Boulder), The ijāza of al‐ʿAllāma al‐Ḥillī to the Banū Zuhra: Sources for the History of the School of Ḥilla
• Devin Stewart (Emory College), Notes on the Life and Legacy of al‐Shahīd al‐Thānī, Zayn al‐Dīn al‐ʿĀmilī
• Edmund Hayes (Leiden University), How do we deal with Imamic hadith? The case of the historical development in the Imams’ statements of khums
• Robert Gleave (Exeter University), Early Shīʿī law: Limitations and Possibilities of Current Scholarship

9 DECEMBER

• Carmela Baffioni (Institute for Ismaili Studies, London), The Problem of Additions in the Manuscript Tradition of the Ikhwān al‐Ṣafāʾ
• Daniella Talmon‐Heller (Ben‐Gurion University of the Negev), Fatimid Ritual: from Mamluk to Modern Scholarship
• Rodrigo Adem, Ismāʿīlism as Shīʿism: The Construction of a Historical Category of Analysis
• George Warner (SOAS, University of London), Shīʿism as Epic in the ʿAlī Nāmah
• Michael Dann (College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana), The Origins, Usage and Indeterminacy of Sectarian Labels: “Batris” and “Rafidis” as Case Studies
• Mohammad Sagha (University of Chicago), Early Shīʿī Discourse on Religious Leadership: Penitence, Revolution and Eschatology after Imam Ḥusayn
• Hussein Abdulsater (University of Notre Dame), Mu’tazilism ignored, espoused and negotiated: Imami interpretations of the Covenant Verse
• Walid Saleh (University of Toronto), Shiite anti‐Sunni Polemics and the Sunni Tafsir Tradition

Source: https://www.ias.edu/ssrp/events_conferences