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Islamic Studies in U.S. Universities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Charles Kurzman  and
Carl W. Ernst
Charles Kurzman
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Carl W. Ernst
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Extract

As in Europe, Islamic studies in the U.S. originated in the tradition of Orientalist scholarship and Christian theology, with its strong textual emphasis, but it has gradually expanded to overlap with Middle East area studies as well as a number of humanistic and social science disciplines, especially religious studies. Over the past several decades, and especially since 9/11, scholarly interest in Islamic studies has mushroomed. This interest is visible in the number of doctoral dissertations produced on Islam and Muslims over the past half-century. As a percentage of all dissertations in the Proquest Dissertations and Theses Database, Islamic studies themes grew from less than one percent prior to the late 1970s to three percent in the 1980s and 1990s, to over four percent since 2001 (see Figure l).

Type
Essays
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , Summer 2012 , pp. 24 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2012

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References

End Notes

1 We thank Seteney Shami and the Social Science Research Council for their support of this project. For a comparative international overview of the field, see the June 2008 report of the Higher Education Foundation Council for England (HEFCE), “International Approaches to Islamic Studies in Higher Education,” http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2008/rd07_08/.Google Scholar

2 ProQuest’s Dissertations and Theses Database. Search terms: Ph.D. dissertations only, Islam* or Muslim* in title, abstract, subject, or keyword. Includes a few non-U.S. dissertations.Google Scholar

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22 We thank Professor Omid Safi for assistance in collecting these figures. For a list of current job openings in Islamic studies, see http://mideast.unc.edu/jobs.Google Scholar

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33 These abstracts are written by the Historical Abstracts staff, not by the articles’ authors; IJMES does not run abstracts. An alternative method, counting articles with the word “Islam” in the full text of IJMES articles, shows no trend over the period 1970–2003. However, this method, using JSTOR’s Data for Research service (http://dfr.jstor.org), does not allow for truncation (it would have to be run separately for the word “Islamic,” for example), and picks up a large number of articles that do not focus primarily on Islam.

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39 Respondent P43, school #500, 2005–2006.

40 Respondent P11, school #400, 2005–2006; Respondent P7, school #600, 2005–2006.

41 Respondent P38, school #300, 2005–2006; Respondent P40, school #100, 2005–2006.

42 Respondent P1, school #200, 2005–2006.

43 Graham, William A., Waldman, Marilyn Robinson, and Rozen, Miryam, eds., Islam-Fiche (Zug, Switzerland: Inter Documentation Co., 1983)Google Scholar; Bodman, Herbert L. and Humphreys, R. Stephen, eds., The Lands and People of Islam: A Traditional Perspective (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1987).Google Scholar