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Overview


Maroun El Houkayem is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Religion. His major is Early Christianity, and he has minors in Middle Eastern Studies and Religion and Modernity. His work studies the social contexts and intellectual currents that drove scholars to seek out manuscripts from the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It demonstrates how the moving and appropriation of manuscripts to construct academic fields of study are inscribed in social networks and power relations that spread outside the academy. 

His dissertation tentatively titled "Gathering the Orient: Manuscripts, Collectors, and Religion," looks at case studies of foundational collectors of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts in the United Kingdom, France, and Lebanon.This project seeks not only to retrace the trajectories of these objects, but also to analyze how they shaped the self-representation and image of their custodians and informed prevailing discourses about colonialism, nationalism, and religion. Each case study illustrates how ostensibly scientific or secular practices surrounding manuscripts reinforce the separation between heritage communities and academic ones.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Recent Publications


Opening the Closet

Journal Article Bulletin for the Study of Religion · August 19, 2024 Featured Publication The Essay provides space for scholars to present peer-reviewed research in a manner that uses data studies and critical reflection as occasions for advancing currents in the broader academic study of religion. We are pleased to bring you two such p ... Full text Cite

Orientalism, Disorientation, and the “Other Side of the World”

Journal Article Studies in Late Antiquity · May 1, 2023 Featured Publication This paper examines orientalism and its repercussions in the field of Late Antiquity. Instead of treating orientalism as a textual phenomenon, I argue that it is a continuous experiential process that comes as a result of encountering texts, object ... Full text Open Access Cite
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