Travel, Study, and Piety & the Islamic Traditions of Africa
In partnership with the African Studies Program and Institute for Islamic Studies, the School of Religious Studies brought Ousmane Kane, the emeritus Alwaleed bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Religion and Society at Harvard Divinity School for a series of events from April 8-11th, 2025. As the world’s leading scholar at the intersection of Islamic Studies and African Studies, he delivered a keynote lecture “Decolonizing the Study of Islam in Africa” which highlighted the historical and theoretical problems that have and continue to hamper effective study of Islam in Africa. He also addressed how African Islam is becoming increasingly central to the global Muslim community, a development which the academy has yet to fully appreciate and understand, before he engaged with students and faculty in discussions about how to frame research and the largely colonial, imaginary, and misleading division between North and “Arab” Africa and “Black”, sub-Saharan Africa.
Professor Kane also anchored a panel entitled “Travel, Study, and Piety & the Islamic Traditions of Africa” in which he, SRS Professor Ayodeji Ogunnaike, and UVA’s Professor Oludamini Ogunnaike delivered papers onnthe longstanding participation of African Muslims in the circulation of students, scholars, texts (oral, written, and both), through extensive scholarly and pilgrimage networks extending from Brazil through the African continent and the Arabian Peninsula. Finally, Professor Ayodeji Ogunnaike facilitated a public conversation with Professors Kane and Oludamini Ogunnaike on their experience with the interdisciplinary connections between the fields of Religious Studies, Islamic Studies, and African Studies. They offered key insights on how centering the practices of African Muslim communities rather than traditional academic disciplines can be wonderfully productive for students and generative for those disciplines themselves by pushing them further and revealing new ways that they can be combined and articulated.
6th annual conference on pre-modern Japanese religions: The Sounds and Colours of Japanese Rites
On October 23-24 2025, SRS Director Mikaël Bauer organized the sixth annual conference on pre-modern Japanese religions entitled The Sounds and Colours of Japanese Rites. Generously supported by The Japan Foundation, Numata Canada and the School of Religious Studies, this interdisciplinary event brought together twenty scholars around the topics of ritual music, the material culture of Shinto and Buddhist rites, imperial shrines, and the ritual usage of poetry. Junior and senior speakers from Japan, North America and Europe engaged in presentations and lively discussions in SRS’ Senior Common Room for two days. This year’s conference was the sixth and largest pre-modern Japanese religions conference organized at SRS.
This year’s conference included the following participants: Michiko Urita (Kogakkan), Róisín Lacey-McCormac (University of Michigan), Giolai Andrea (Leiden), Marina Pandolfino ( Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) – PSL), Tianran Hang (Columbia University), Tetsuro Shiokawa (Kogakkan), Maria Salvador (Harvard University), Christina Laffin (UBC), Chihiro Saka ( Nichibunken), Abigail MacBain (University of Edinburgh), Julia Cross (Mount Allison University), Monika Kiss (ELTE University Budapest), Bryan Lowe (Princeton University), Pamela Winfield (Elon University), Yagi Morris (ɬ), Haruka Saito (SOAS London) and Alexander Dieplam (ɬ).