Overview
Katherine Pratt Ewing, Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University.
212-851-9280
ke2131@columbia.edu
http://religion.columbia.edu/people/Katherine%20Ewing
http://ircpl.org/
Until 2010, she was Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Religion at Duke University, where she served as the Executive Director of the North Carolina Consortium for South Asian Studies. In 2010-2011 she was Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison before moving to Columbia’s Religion Department in 2011. Her research ranges from debates among Muslims about the proper practice of Islam in the modern world to sexualities, gender, and the body in South Asia. She has done ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, Turkey and India, and among Muslims in Germany, The Netherlands, and the United States.
Professor Ewing received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1980 and took postdoctoral training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. She has received numerous awards and honors, including the L. Bryce Boyer Prize of the Society for Psychological Anthropology (1990), a Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin (1999), a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar grant (2000-2002), and a Residential Fellowship as Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (2006-7). Her 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).
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
The dream of Pakistan and the unIslamic other
Journal Article Psychoanalysis Culture and Society · December 1, 2024 In this article, we consider the idea of the nation as a collective fantasy, an illusion of wholeness that seeks congruence between the nation as a people and the state. In Pakistan, the vision of the nation is based not on ethnic ties but on the idea of I ... Full text CiteThe Khwajasara and the Malang: Gender, desire, and the path to God in modern Pakistan
Journal Article History and Anthropology · January 1, 2024 In Pakistan the shared imaginal world of khwajasaras and malangs has been fractured by the divergent ways that each has been taken up in legal and religious discourse within the modern state. Tracing the development of the khwajasara as a secular, transgen ... Full text CitePsychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story.
Journal Article Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East · 2022 CiteRecent Grants
Teaching South Asia Through Material Objects and Performance Events
Public ServicePrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Department of Education · 2008 - 2009The Milli Gorus and the Diyanet: Competing Muslim Challenges to the Relationship between "Church and State" in Europe
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation · 2001 - 2002"Secularist Turkey's Official Islam and the Shaping of Turkish Migrant Religious and Political Identies in Germany
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation · 1999 - 2000View All Grants