Academic Board
Conference Organizer:
Dr. Sophia Pandya
Chair
Department of Religious Studies
California State University at Long Beach
Sophia Pandya is currently a full professor and department chair at California State University at Long Beach, in the Department of Religious Studies. She received her BA from UC Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies/Arabic, and her MA and Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara in Religious Studies. A Fulbright scholar, she specializes in women and Islam, and, more broadly, in contemporary movements within Islam. Dr. Pandya has authored a book (2012), Muslim Women and Islamic Resurgence: Religion, Education, and Identity Politics in Bahrain, on Bahraini women and the ways in which globalization and modern education impacted their religious activities. Having carried out research in Turkey on several occasions, she is also the co-editor of a second published volume (2012), The Gülen Hizmet Movement and its Transnational Activities: Case Studies on Charitable Activism. She is now finishing a manuscript on the Hizmet movement, alterity, and the challenges of altruism. Her interests have also included religious change in Yemen among both the younger and older generations of women and the ways in which they negotiate conflicting religious discourses.
ACADEMIC BOARD
Dr. Anwar Alam
Dr. Anwar Alam is a Senior Fellow with Policy Perspectives Foundation, New Delhi. Earlier, he served as a full Professor in the Department of International Relations, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Science, Zirve University, Gaziantep, Turkey; Professor and Director of the Centre for West Asian Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI); Assistant and Associate Professor at the Centre for West Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. In addition, he has been awarded several long- and short-term fellowships, including the International Visitor Programme (Islamic) Scholarship, United States (2002); the Indo-French Social Scientist Exchange Programme Fellowship (2003, 2010); the Alexandor Von Humboldt Post Doctoral Fellowship, Germany (2004-2006).
Dr. Liza Dumovich
Editor of Revista Diáspora & Associate Researcher at the Center for Middle East Studies at UFF
Dr. Liza Dumovich has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil, where she is also an associate researcher at the Centre for Middle East Studies. She earned her MA in anthropology from the same institution. She is coordinator of the Centre for Middle East Studies and Research at Universidade Candido Mendes and co-editor of the online magazine Revista Diaspora, about the MENA region and its diasporas. She is the author of the book Ya Habibi: conversão feminina ao islã no Rio de Janeiro, which analyzes the process of conversion to Islam among Brazilian women in Rio de Janeiro. In addition, Liza studied the Hizmet movement and published papers on Hizmet.
- Travel as hicret: (Re)Framing Experiences of Exile in the Gülen Community in Brazil
- Pious Creativity: Negotiating Hizmet in South America After July 2016.
- Religious Nationalism and Ethnicity: The Identity Formation of the Hizmet Community in Brazil
Dr. TL Hill
Dr. TL Hill is a Professor of Strategic Management at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. He serves as Managing Director of Translational Research Center and Fox Management Consulting. TL teaches highly experiential classes, including the MBA capstone, featuring live client projects (501 projects and counting!), the Fox Board Fellows nonprofit governance class, and community and executive education workshops. TL is co-author of more than 35 peer-reviewed publications and commissioned reports and serves on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Review.
Dr. Mark Juergensmeyer
Dr. Mark Juergensmeyer is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Global Studies, Sociology and an affiliate of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the founding director of the Global and International Studies Program and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution, and South Asian religion and politics and has published more than three hundred articles and thirty books, including the forthcoming When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends (University of California Press, 2022), God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (Oxford, 2021), and the co-authored God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society (University of California Press, 2015; co-authored with Dinah Griego and John Soboslai).
Dr. Zeki Saritoprak
Dr. Zeki Saritoprak is a Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Bediuzzaman Said Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies at John Carroll University, USA. Dr. Zeki Sanitoprak received his Ph.D. in Islamic Theology from the University of Marmara in Turkey.
He is the author of many works on Islam, spirituality, and interfaith dialogue, including academic articles and encyclopedia entries on topics in Islam, in addition to his latest book “Islam’s Jesus.”
Dr. Ori Soltes
Dr. Ori Z. Soltes teaches at Georgetown University across various disciplines, from theology and art history to philosophy and political history. He has also taught at Johns Hopkins University, Cleveland State University, Siegel College, and Case Western Reserve University. In addition, Soltes has authored and edited 19 books, scores of articles, and exhibition catalog essays. Recent volumes include Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source; The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust; Mysticism in Judaism. Christianity and Islam: Searching for Oneness; Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish art and Architecture; Magic and Religion in the Greco-Roman World: The Beginnings of Judaism and Christianity; and God and the Goalposts: A Brief History of Sports, Religion, Politics, War, and Art.
Dr. Mark Webb
Dr. Mark Webb is a Professor and Chairman of the Philosophy Department at Texas Tech University. He received his B.A. in philosophy and two M.A. degrees, one in philosophy and the other in Classical Humanities, from Texas Tech University. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Syracuse University. Professor Webb specializes in epistemology and philosophy of religion. He is currently working on the epistemology of religious experience, especially as it applies to non-Western religious experiences. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Hypatia, and “An Eliminativist Theory of Religion” in Sophia.
Dr. Paul Weller
Dr. Paul Weller’s academic work explores issues in religion, state, and society relationships, with special emphasis on matters of religion or belief, discrimination and equality, human rights, and freedom of religion or belief, especially in the UK and Europe. Prof. Weller’s other key areas of interest are religions and statistics, inter-religious and inter-convictional dialogue, the teaching of the Turkish Muslim scholar Fethullah Gulen, and the development and practice of the Hizmet movement inspired by his teaching. He also works more theologically on the contemporary interpretation and application of Baptist Christian theological traditions of freedom and witness.