Dept. of Religious Studies

This contains the following materials from my completed (2018) dissertation:
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Introduction
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This piece for the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, Vol. II, examines the life and works of Jalal al-din Rumi. It discusses key issues in the study of Mowlana/Rumi, and includes a description of the style and examples from each of his key pieces of writing. Target audience is undergraduates in world literature classes, graduate students in religious studies, and/or use by professors who wish to include Rumi in their syllabi. Resources for further study of Rumi are included in the references.

Jalal al-Din Rumi (Jalāl al-Dīn Muh. ammad Rūmī) is best known as a mystic poet and promulgator of the Sufi tradition of Islam. During his lifetime, Jalal al-Din Rumi was a teacher in Islamic religious sciences, a prolific author, and the figurehead of a religious community that would come to be known as the Mevlevi Sufi order. His followers called him "Khodavandgar" (an honorific meaning "Lord") or "Hazrat-e Mawlana" (meaning the "Majesty of Our Master," often shortened to "Mawlana," in Turkish rendered as "Mevlana") (Safi 1999, 55-58). As with his appellations, the legacy and import of Rumi and his poetry have been understood in a variety of forms. Jalal al-Din Rumi's renown places him amongst the pantheon of great Persian-language poets of the classical Islamicate literary tradition that includes Hafez (see Hafez of Shiraz, Constantinople, and Weltliteratur), Sa  di,  Attar, Nezami (see Nizami's Resonances in Persianate Literary Cultures and Beyond), and Ferdowsi (see The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi). While all of these poets produced large bodies of literature, Rumi's writing differs somewhat in the circumstances of its production. His poetry was composed in front of, and for the sake of, a community of murids (murīds), or pupils, who relied on Rumi for his mystical teachings related to the articulation of Islam through the lens of love of the divine. At times, he delivered his ghazal (see The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi) poetry in fits of ecstatic rapture. His poetry vacillates between inspired and seemingly extemporaneous tones to the didactic and measured style of a master teacher. His poems and other teachings guided many Sufi adherents, and found favor amongst popular and courtly Persian, Turkish, and Urdu-speaking audiences for centuries following his passing. As a result of popular translations in the A Companion to World Literature. Edited by Ken Seigneurie.

Ostensibly unprecedented pieces of architecture, the Seed Cathedral in the Shanghai World Expo and Isfahan's Pigeon Towers in Iran, are two instances where celebrating nature has been formally manifested. In addition to their immediate functions-the former is an exhibition space and the latter a facility which collects birds' droppings as natural fertilizer-they have transcendental intentions: through the formal glorification of the natural, both projects connote the perpetual and timeless interdependencies between the human and nature. By comparing these two buildings, the paper will demonstrate how the same desire has been resurrected into distinct architectural types across time and place. Beyond their similar ecological intentions, the tectonic logic rooted in the agglomeration of an irreducible unit-the dimension of which is based on the bodily proportions of the organism it accommodates-allows these two artifacts to relate in an intricate way. By focusing on the ecological and sustainable features of the Pigeon Towers, the paper will reiterate architecture's capacity to operate simultaneously in two extreme domains: overlaying the maximum efficiency and the aesthetic perfection. To substantiate the analogy, the paper utilizes Synonymity in Architecture as an operative theory of design to reveal the identical underpinning formation of the two projects. It explains how two ostensibly contrasting artifacts are essentially interrelated.

Cultural assimilation of "Muslim" immigrants in Europe poses a foundational question to political philosophy: is assimilation a prerequisite for socioeconomic integration? What is often interpreted as the symptom of failed integration is the proliferation of ethnic enclaves in European metropolises. Non-white immigrants who experience discrimination and marginalization withdraw into isolated zones, creating internal borders within cities. These spaces are susceptible to a host of social problems and often become a fertile ground for radicalization. The State turns to design techniques to break open these ghettoized zones. This paper analyzes an urban renewal project that was conceived to address marginality in one such neighborhood in Copenhagen. Despite the façade of inclusivity and democratic participation, the design creates a parody of Muslim cultures by remixing culturally-significant symbols. In representing immigrants' cultures as "Other," the ideology of design mirrors the exclusionary preferences of the politics of the border.

Ehsan Sheikholharam is a teaching fellow and a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Situated at the intersection of architecture and religion, his work examines the religiosity of non-religious architecture. Beyond his primary focus on the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, his research spans interrogations of ideologies of public space, spatial motifs in cinema, and theories of subjectivity. He has received recognition from institutions such as the University of Miami, Dumbarton Oaks' Mellon Initiative, and the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute. His work has been published in the American Academy of Religion's Reading Religion, Maydan, CLOG, and WIT Press.

The book tells the story of repentance, its genealogy as a concept. It identifies repentance as a product of the Hellenistic period, where it was taken up within emerging forms of Judaism and Christianity as a mode of subjective control. It argues that, along with the rise of repentance, a series of interpretive practices were put into place whereby repentance is read into the Bible and the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, comes to be seen as repentance’s source. Ancient Israelite rituals, such as fasting, prayer, and confession are understood to be part of penitence, external signs of internal remorse. Hebrew terms and phrases, such as the prophetic injunction to “return to YHWH,” are read as ancient representations of the concept, repentance. Prophetic literature as a whole is seen as serving a pedagogical purpose, as aiming at the reformation of Israel as a nation. Furthermore, it is assumed that, on the basis of the Bible, sectarians living in the late Second Temple period, from the Dead Sea sect to the early Jesus movement, believed that their redemption depended upon their repentance. In fact, the penitential framework within which the Bible is interpreted tells us the most about our own interpretive tendencies, our hermeneutics, how we privilege dualistic notions of the self that highlight interiority, autonomy, and virtue. The book develops other frameworks for explaining the biblical phenomena in their ancient contexts, based on alternative views of the body, power, speech, and the divine, and, thereby, offers a new account of repentance’s origins.

This article considers the legacy of James Barr’s The Semantics of Biblical Language. Ideally, his criticisms of theology’s use of philology would have been assimilated already into the field. But the kinds of abuses that Barr so clearly identified and critiqued are still commonly found. As a way of exploring this state of affairs, the case of metanoia (“repentance”) in New Testament studies is taken up in the first part of this article.
The second part of the article considers the ways in which Barr’s thoroughgoing critique of its specious appropriation for theology has left many justifiably skittish about employing it to any significant effect and has contributed, perhaps, to the sense that ongoing engagement with the original languages of biblical literature is not a necessity and, certainly, not an avenue to creative scholarship. Examples will be adduced from biblical Hebrew ydʿ (“know”), lev (“heart”), and ʾhb (“love”) for how we might approach language and its deployment as a way of engaging difference in and through, among other topics, ancient Israelite thinking about “mind” and “emotions.”
The article concludes with the suggestion that we might move the practice of philology forward in biblical studies by attending more fully to the positionality of its practitioners. In particular, what emerges throughout the study is the dominance of a certain interiorizing language of the self, whereby biblical Hebrew terms are made to conform to a modern dichotomy of mind and body.

The Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is pleased to announce that we are offering paid fellowships for doctoral students in Hebrew Bible through the Ancient Mediterranean Religions subfield for the academic year 2025-2026. UNC's Department of Religious Studies is one of the top ranked graduate programs in religion. In particular, the Department is known for its pedagogical training and for engaging contemporary theories of religion. Graduate students would qualify to receive additional support from the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. For students starting in Fall 2025, the application deadline is December 10, 2024. The doctoral program offers an opportunity for students to receive a broad based education in the study of religion while also pursuing specialized training in the Hebrew Bible in its ancient Near Eastern context and the history of biblical interpretation. The faculty have strong interests in late Second Temple Judaism as well.

This article examines the role of “desire” in the wilderness narratives. It argues that conventional translations, both ancient and modern, of taʾavah in Numbers 11:4, 34 as “desire/craving/lust" are inflected by a discourse that first emerges in the Hellenistic period around the twin concerns of emotion and virtue and their necessary relationship. While the story of the people’s “desire” for meat comes to be read by Philo and others as a cautionary tale against a lust for flesh, its original situation in the wilderness narratives suggests something more like a material demand of the deity condemned more for its theological-political implications than the presence of any vice that it might suggest. The article expands upon this more embodied, enactive understanding of taʾavah with reference to other biblical passages in which the term appears.

That something happened in the history of ancient Israel, whereby certain scrolls became "Law," Judaism a "religion of laws," and Jews a "people of the book" remains a commonplace in biblical studies. 1 The claim for such a transformation rests to a surprising extent on a semantic argument, the main contours of which are already present in Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena. 2 There Wellhausen describes what might be referred to as the differentiated meanings and evolutionary development of the term, tôrâ. Tôrâ, according to Wellhausen, starts its history as a mode of oral instruction. At its roots, it is the verbal action of a subject, that is, "direction" or "decision:" 3

This article takes up Erich Auerbach‘s claim that, while biblical narrative, unlike ancient Greek heroic epic, refrains from directly addressing the emotions of its characters, it is “fraught with background” and gestures at them repeatedly. The reader, in other words, is meant to fill in the gaps. Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg and others have largely follwed that suggestion in their work on biblical narrative. I argue that this thread of narrative theory corresponds to a Western, dualistic theory of knowledge that proceeds with a dichotomy between the representation of the material world and its underlying spiritual realities. Instead I propose that the apparent treatment of biblical characters as flat has to do with a different notion of personhood present in ancient Israel, one in which the contents of the person are not located in their interior, with their body being exterior, but rather are produced
as a series of effects through social relations, material commitments, events, and objects that extend beyond the self and exist between selves. I explore this theme through several focal points in the Joseph narratives – Joseph‘s dream, the brothers‘ "guilt,“ Joseph‘s weeping, and Judah‘s petition – with special attention to issues of emotion and translation as they pertain to Hebrew terms for “love” (ʾhb), “hate” (śnʾ ), “jealousy” (qn’), “memory” (zkr), “guilt” (‘sm̆ ), and “sight” (rʾh).