Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He is the author four books and numerous academic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, Desiring Arabs which won the Lionnel Trilling Award, and Islam in Liberalism. Professor Massad is also a regular contributor of articles and op-eds to Al-Jazeera English website, the Al-Ahram Weekly based in Cairo, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar among others. His books and articles have been translated to many languages including Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Turkish, Persian, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Dutch.
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Abstract:
In the last decade a new academic effort within the new field of sexuality studies has sought to study what scholars in the field and outside it began to call sexuality in Islam. The lecture will unpack what this means through reviewing this literature and will propose that what much of the published research has uncovered is not how an often ill-defined category like sexuality operates within a never defined category like Islam but rather how the name and category Islam operates within the field of sexuality studies.
