College of Arts & Humanities

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From Islamic Exceptionalism to Universal Religious Categories: Reconceptualizations of Dīn and Millet in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire
(2024) Agalar, Saban; Karamustafa, Ahmet T.; Zilfi, Madeline C.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the transformation of the Islamic category of religion through a conceptual history of dīn (often translated as “religion”) and millet (often translated as “community”) during the Ottoman Empire from the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. Arabic and Turkish world histories, which flourished during this period, exhibited a significant expansion in geographical and cultural scope compared to earlier examples and rarely focused on the House of Osman or Islamic history. I argue that these world historians similarly presented dīn as a universal analytical unit, challenging traditional Islamic scholarship that had reserved dīn for Islam or other monotheistic faiths. By presenting Islam as one dīn among many, these authors viewed dīn as a universal social phenomenon comparable to other domains of human life, although differing perspectives persisted among legal scholars, polemicists, and heresiographers. These world histories, along with a growing body of literature on non-Muslim faiths and scriptures, were also characterized by a more detached and analytical approach to their subjects. The dissertation links these conceptual and historiographical shifts to changes in Ottoman self-perception amid increasing awareness of cultural diversity and declining imperial power. This reconceptualization of dīn coincided with debates on the related term of millet, traditionally associated with monotheistic communities, as scholars explored its broader applicability to various religious groups. In addition to a close reading of historical and religious works, the dissertation employs computational tools to analyze substantial volumes of Ottoman texts, including court records and Evliyā Çelebi’s Seyāḥatnāme, to trace how millet was used in both official and literary contexts. For world historians, millet generally implies a shared confession, which is not always monotheistic. In the Seyāḥatnāme, millet typically refers to Christian communities within the empire while excluding Jews, whereas in court records, it primarily signifies the Muslim community, with occasional references to non-Muslim groups.While focusing on native concepts as understood by the Ottomans themselves, the dissertation also draws parallels with Protestant approaches to categorizing religion, noting similar efforts to develop comprehensive taxonomies in both contexts. At the same time, it underlines key differences: while the Protestant model prioritized creed as the central feature of “world religions,” Ottoman world historians embraced a broader understanding of dīn and millet, which included beliefs, acts of worship, belonging to a confessional community, and sometimes customs and morality. These Ottoman historians did not often exclude polytheistic communities as their Protestant counterparts did. Beyond offering an overlooked conceptual history expressed in an understudied historiographical genre in the Ottoman Empire, this dissertation’s potential contributions extend to the broader fields of Islam and the study of religion. By challenging narrowly defined and ahistorical Islamic conceptualizations of religion and non-Muslim faiths, it aims to expand the current understanding of Islam, moving beyond the traditional focus on the Quran and a few medieval classics. Additionally, the study engages with broader theoretical debates on the nature of religion, questioning the universality of post-Enlightenment European models by exploring non-Western religious categories in early modern history.
UNA MODERNIDAD TENSIONADA: LA PRENSA CATÓLICA DE LOS AÑOS 20 EN BUENOS AIRES
(2022) Maurette, Sofia; Demaria, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Según la Pew Foundation, Latinoamérica es uno de los continentes más religiosos del mundo, con más del 90% de su población identificándose como parte de una religión organizada. Sin embargo, la religión latinoamericana no ha recibido una atención equivalente a sus números. Mi investigación analiza el campo poco estudiado de la religión latinoamericana a través de la lente de su producción cultural, combinando los campos de los estudios religiosos con los estudios literarios y culturales latinoamericanos. En mi trabajo afirmo que definiciones estrechas sobre la Modernidad e ideas normativas sobre el lugar de la religión en la esfera pública moderna, uno de los postulados de la "teoría de la secularización", han resultado en una lectura sesgada de los movimientos y textos religiosos latinoamericanos, generalmente considerados incompatibles con sus aspiraciones modernas.En mi tesis me centro específicamente en las revistas católicas argentinas y su compromiso con las consecuencias del proceso de modernización del país a principios del siglo XX. Para una de estas revistas, Criterio (1928-presente), esto significó elaborar un lenguaje que adoptó la retórica de los movimientos de vanguardia para atraer a la élite intelectual a la que deseaban convertir. La revista femenina Noel (1920-1939), por otro lado, al contrastar la construcción tradicional de género dentro del catolicismo con las nuevas definiciones de feminidad adoptadas por los movimientos feministas contemporáneos, se convirtió en un espacio seguro para sus autoras en el cual construir y realizar una comprensión del género que, si bien respaldaba explícitamente una cosmovisión patriarcal, reformulaba sutilmente el papel de la mujer dentro de ella.
TERROR IN THE PYRENEES: RELIGION, REVOLUTION AND THE NATION IN SOUTHWESTERN FRANCE, 1789-1794
(2022) Brower, Jonathan Christopher; Villani, Stefano; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the ways in which revolutionaries in France used religion to define concepts of citizenship, belonging, and identity between the years 1789 and 1794. It contends that the religious policies of the Terror (1793-1794), which it terms the “Sacerdotal Revolution,” were an attempt to construct a new imagined national religious community centered on the worship of the Supreme Being and the nation. It demonstrates that at the beginning of the eighteenth-century, French society was divided between two mutually complementary spheres of authority: the temporal realm of kings and the spiritual realm of Church. Over the course of the century, political and religious writers put forward arguments that essentially integrated spiritual institutions into the terrestrial world, thus paving the way for the formation of a national religious community embodied in the Constitutional Catholic Church of 1791. However, the failure the Constitutional Catholic Church to provide national religious consensus and the looming threat of war, polarized and politicized identities inside and outside the French Republic, and led some revolutionaries during the Terror to embrace a type of universal patriotic religion predicated upon an exclusionary national identity. As this dissertation maintains, at the heart of the debate over religion during the French Revolution was a tension between universalism and particularism, and the ways in which diverse religious and ethnic identities were able to relate to the universal category of French citizenship. This tension was most acute in the southwestern borderlands of France, which were characterized by ethnic and religious diversity. As a result, all those who fell outside the boundaries of the universal patriotic religion of the Sacerdotal Revolution were considered counterrevolutionary religious fanatics in need of regeneration. At the same time, the universalist discourse of the Sacerdotal Revolution also offered some ethno-religious minorities a chance to exercise their citizenship. Thus, by studying the religious debates of the French Revolution, this dissertation seeks to show how revolutionaries in southwestern France attempted to construct a new imagined religious community during a moment of religious conflict, political factionalism, and war.
Sunday Morning Matters: The Production of Gendered Subjects in White Evangelical Life
(2021) Michael, Kelsey Sherrod; Wong, Janelle; Padios, Jan; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
As evangelical Christian demographics in the United States have increasingly diversified, pundits and scholars have sought to understand the persistent political power of white American evangelicals. This interdisciplinary dissertation argues that a key mechanism of the political formation of white evangelical Christians has been hiding in plain sight: The weekly church worship service in predominantly white congregations has provided remarkable continuity as a means of political formation for churchgoers, particularly through worship rituals indebted to ideologies of gender and race. Drawing on Black feminist thought, phenomenology, and the anthropology of religion, I describe the white evangelical church worship service as an axis of “haunting” across time and space, where patriarchal relations of power built on racialized discourses of manhood and womanhood continue to shape the everyday lives of churchgoing women. I rely on textual analysis of evangelical digital culture and original ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, with churchgoing women in the southern U.S. to uncover how women’s experiences in church structure their consciousness in dimensions of their lives not often considered inherently “religious”—work and labor, sex and marriage, performance and material culture, and the knowledge and discipline of the self. In clarifying this phenomenological process by which churchgoing women become gendered and therefore political subjects, the project identifies the significance of the white evangelical church worship service to white evangelical subject formation and the implication of white supremacy in this process. More broadly, the dissertation calls for a reappraisal of the importance of religious ritual to the construction of identity and difference in and through white American Christianity.
Translating Grace: Postsecularity in Twentieth-Century American Fiction
(2021) Gonch, William; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The early twentieth century saw the rise of new, secular ways of imagining and understanding religion, especially through social sciences such as psychology and anthropology. TRANSLATING GRACE: POSTSECULARITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION investigates creative responses to this secular imaginary by novelists invested in religion’s continuing power. For the four primary subjects of this study—Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson—secular ways of imagining religion were at once challenges and opportunities. They foreclosed conventional expressions of religious ideas, experiences, and narratives, but they could be used creatively to reimagine religious stories and symbols, giving them fresh life and applying them to new challenges. I propose the metaphor of translation to understand the creative exchange between secular and religious writing. Literary translation is a creative activity that stretches the boundaries of a target language so that it may mean things that it has never meant before; similarly, writing of religion in this period is a translational attempt to stretch secular categories. Novelists jettison conventional religious narratives and symbols and invent new literary forms to make religious experiences and beliefs register for new readers. In doing so, they create new ways of experiencing and reckoning with religion. Translating Grace reassesses accounts of religion and literature by emphasizing the creative potential of religious writing. Previous studies of this period theorize a crucial break around 1960. Before that point, literature secularizes; artists look to art as a substitute for religion and treat religion’s fading as inevitable. After 1960 there is renewed interest in religious narratives, symbols, and practices, but it is “weak” religion, shorn of doctrinal and metaphysical claims. In contrast, I propose that “strong” religion persists as an important creative presence in 20th century literature. Whether strong or weak, religion becomes more self-conscious about its need to make itself comprehensible. Writers engage, sometimes subversively, sometimes playfully, with secular imaginaries. In this way, fiction drives a wider transformation of life within religious communities as they reimagine their place within a now-more-secular culture and world.
A New Race of Christians: Slavery and the Cultural Politics of Conversion in the Atlantic World
(2020) Fischer, Matthias; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation is intended to fill a significant gap in the scholarship on slavery, race, and religion in the early modern Atlantic. Restoring a longue durée approach to the study of colonial history, it argues that there was a long, broad, and vibrant debate over the legitimacy of slavery and race. A central analytical tenet of this work is that religion and race were concepts linked from the early decades of colonization and developed in conjunction with one another. Enslavement predicated on heathenism brought baptism in particular to the center of the debate over whether African slaves could become free by adopting Christianity. Heathenism was central to early justifications of African slavery in the plantation colonies of the New World, and it also played a fundamental role in the construction, contestation, and articulation of racial categories, even if Christianity remained an important marker of colonial identity and social belonging.While the accommodation between the clergy and governors, planters, vestries, and colonial assemblies often conflated Christianity’s moral obligations with colonial self‐interest, religion and religious ideas also helped to challenge and undermine hierarchies based on race. Whether they were Jesuit priests, Anglican ministers, Quaker clerics, or Moravian evangelicals, missionaries of all backgrounds were able to provide a measure of spiritual and material relief to men and women who experienced human, material, and cultural deprivation on a massive scale. In these ways, enslaved and free people of African descent ascribed new meaning to Christianity that transcended narrow European definitions, challenging emergent notions of racial difference. Linking intellectual processes with social and political practices and institutions, this study attempts to resituate the Caribbean as foundational to the creation of a modern consciousness.
POLEMIC AGAINST PRE-ISLAMIC DEITIES IN THE SŪRAH NAMED AFTER THE PLEIADES
(2020) Zaman, Asad Uz; Borrut, Antoine; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The thesis explores the idea of whether Allāt, al-‘Uzzā, and Manāt were worshipped as manifestations of Venus by Muhammad’s pagan opponents known as the mushrikūn; an idea inspired through engagement with Gerald Hawting’s book The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam. By reading Q53 Sūrat al-Najm within a broader context of ancient Near Eastern astral religion/mythology I develop an “astral” interpretation of Muhammad’s angelic vision of the Archangel Gabriel, highlighting how the description of Gabriel at the beginning of the sūrah parallels the movements of Venus as the morning star in some salient features. Based on this finding I argue that the Venusian description of Gabriel serves as a polemic posing him in comparison to the goddesses mentioned later in the sūrah at Q53:19-20. These developments prompt me to examine their implications for the Satanic verses story and propose a date for Q53’s revelation.
Henry Dumas: Prophet of the Afrosurreal Renaissance
(2019) Jackson, Jeremy Alexander; Nunes, Zita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This literary biography locates the life and work of Henry Dumas – one of the most unique and under-studied writers of the Black Arts Movement – as a radical, revolutionary nexus of Afrosurrealist thought. Afrosurrealism, a term popularized by scholar D. Scot Miller, is a genre of Black American writing wherein Black artists mobilize the aesthetic techniques of surrealism to express the particular experience of being Black in America. Through his “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one,” to quote Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas serves as a vital connecting point between the previous era of Black surrealism and our current Afrosurreal Renaissance. Thus, this literary and critical biography advances a twofold goal: to grant Dumas his rightful place as a central figure in African American literary history, and to recognize the expansive and important scope of the modern Afrosurrealist tradition.
STAGING SACRED SPACE: A Ritual Performance History of the UMD Memorial Chapel
(2017) Cyr, Renee; Frederik, Laurie; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This study addresses the interconnections between belief, ritual, and space. Through an examination of the Memorial Chapel archive, I trace the history of Memorial Chapel from its founding in 1952 through today, focusing on the tension between sacred space and secularism. In this project I examine how religious groups have created and utilized sacred space in a non-denominational chapel as well as in a nontraditional worship spaces on and around campus. This investigates how the chapel itself performs and how participants of religious life perform their faith at a public university. I examine the role of theatricality in shaping religious rituals and giving them potency. In the second part I document my ethnographic research with Lutheran Campus Ministry.
The Altarpieces of Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494): Between Heaven and Earth, Faith and Art
(2017) Cadagin, Sarah Mellott; Gill, Meredith J; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the altarpiece paintings of the late fifteenth-century Italian artist Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-94). While Ghirlandaio’s frescoes have often been studied as paradigms of portraiture and visual narrative, the artist’s 12 surviving altarpiece paintings have received little attention, despite Ghirlandaio’s status as one of the major figures in the history of Renaissance painting. This study is the first comprehensive and contextual investigation of Ghirlandaio’s altarpieces, and one of the first to consider his works on panel outside questions of attribution. My analysis utilizes archival discoveries, alongside focused examinations into the identities of patrons, the commission histories of these works, the original locations of the altarpieces, and the paintings’ diverse sacred iconography. Organized around a range of case studies that include altarpieces for religious orders, cathedrals, civic hospitals, and private patrons, this dissertation also demonstrates the purposes and uses of altarpieces, revealing how this persistent type functioned as a form of visual and sacred power. Altarpieces visualize and index the divine presence contained and invoked at the altar, while also drawing the beholder fully into that presence. As a vehicle between the visible and the invisible, the altarpiece was the perfect means by which artists could explore the challenges of naturalism and mimesis, illusion and the imagination. Rather than seeing artists and their altarpieces as simply reflecting cultural and religious mores, this study argues for the active role that altarpieces played – and the artists who created them – in articulating the ontologies of the altar and its liturgies. Through an examination of Ghirlandaio’s altarpieces, this study proposes a new definition of the fifteenth-century altarpiece as a dynamic object that mediated between the realm of art, as an aesthetic artifact, and the realm of the sacred, as an image that participated in the liturgies of the altar. As the first study to explore Ghirlandaio’s altarpieces, this dissertation produces a new body of knowledge about the artist, his workshop, and his painting practices. More broadly, it reassesses the materiality, functions, and ontologies of altarpieces, leading not only to a greater understanding of Renaissance religious art, but also of sacred art more generally.

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