Peter Mandaville, Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government, received funding for the project: “Black American Muslim internationalism: global genealogies and trajectories of race, religion & liberation.”
The incomplete project of achieving racial justice in the United States has been deeply intertwined with theological debate, religious practice, and the very definitions of race and American identity. The Black American Muslim Internationalism project will map and explore various vectors of the African American Muslim hermeneutic tradition vis-à-vis global and historical Islamic practices and institutions. It does so by working in collaboration with leading university-based scholars as well as a network of community-based historians in three cities (the Washington DC area, Philadelphia, and Atlanta) to develop a multi-tiered research and programming initiative that can influence academic and public narratives around religion, race, and identity while also filling current gaps in the scholarly record. This project will advance public knowledge while also yielding significant impact within academic communities through a range of activities and deliverables, including: public and academic-facing workshops and gatherings; online discussion and debate forums on the Maydan digital publishing platform; public lectures; training workshops on curriculum development and pedagogical application; archive-building research in collaboration with community-based historians; and a public-facing project website organized around a flagship long-form interactive essay on Black American Muslim internationalism.
Mandaville received $250,000 from the Henry R. Luce Foundation for this project. Funding began in January 2022 and will end in late December 2024.
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