Katherine Pratt Ewing
Professor of Religion, Columbia University
Katherine Pratt Ewing is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, Turkey, and India, and among Muslims in Europe and the United States. Her research has focused on debates among Muslims about the proper practice of Islam in the modern world, the place of Muslims within the German national imaginary, and sexualities, gender, and the body in South Asia. She is currently writing a book on the politics of sex change surgery within India’s middle class with Baishakhi Taylor and is PI on an ACLS-funded project “Sufis, Salafis and the Public Square” with Alexander Stille. Recent articles and chapters include “The Ungendered Self: Sex Reassignment, The Third Gender, and Gender Fluidity in India” (forthcoming, with Baishakhi Taylor), “Murder in Chapel Hill: Muslims, the Media, and the Ambivalence of Belonging” (forthcoming), “‘Islam is Not a Culture:’ Reshaping a Muslim Public for a Secular World” (2015), “From German Bus Stop to Academy Award Nomination: The Honor Killing as Simulacrum” (2013), and “Naming our Sexualities: Secular Constraints, Muslim Freedoms” (2011). Her previous books include Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Islam (1997), Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (2008), and the edited volumes Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (1988) and Being and Belonging: Muslim Communities in the US since 9/11 (2008).
Working Group Affiliations
Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies, Project Director