Elizabeth (Lisa) Alexandrin

• RLGN 1340 - Food: Religious Concepts and Practices
• RLGN 2100 - Approaches to the Qur'an
• RLGN 2110 - Religion and Healing
• RLGN 2778 - Introduction to Islam
• RLGN 3194 - Islamic Philosophy
   

Since my MA degree in Anthropology at the University of Toronto in 1992-1993, I have taught as a teaching assistant, a graduate student lecturer, and as an assistant/associate professor in the areas of gender studies, women and religion, and Islamic studies. Since 2005, I’ve developed and taught a sequence of courses on Islamic studies. Since 2016, my broader readings of theoretical literature on gender, the history of feminisms, and the body as archive, have shifted my approaches to teaching courses in religious studies; in particular, courses on Food and Religion, Religion and Healing, and Body History. Teaching opportunities have been invaluable experiences, and in working to bring a wide range of visual resources into the classroom, continue to shape my current research on archival collections for Sufism in Bosnia and Sufi women. In terms of academic and non-academic writing, now I seek more to reflect meaningfully on gender, modernity, and Islam for different audiences and in ways that can be valued by my students who have many questions and thoughts about lived experiences and identities. 

• PhD (Islamic Studies), McGill University, 2006
• MA (Anthropology), University of Toronto, 1993
• BA (Anthropology) Boston University, 1993

Research interests

• Islamic intellectual history
• Sufism
• Ismaili thought
• Body histories
• Visual piety

• “Reading and Reciting the Qurʾān: Calligraphic Spaces in Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūyeh’s Kitāb al-Maḥbūb.” In, Visualizing Sufism. Edited by Giovanni Maria Martini. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2023.
• “Apocalyptic Imaginaries: The Human Form and Borderlines according to Abū Ya’qūb al-Sijistānī.” Global Intellectual History. February 2023. Pages 1-18.
• “Medicinal Gardens, Healing Trails, and Our Pandemic Bodies.” Formum Bosnae. Međunarodni forum Bosna (2020) 91/92: 329-335.
• “Seals and Sealing of Walāyah in Ṣūfī and Shīʿī Texts: The Cases of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī and Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūyah.” Philosophy and the Intellectual Life in Shīʿah Islam. Editors, S. Rizvi & Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad. Oxbow Books. Oxford. 2018.
• Walāyah in the Fāṭimid Ismā‘īlī Tradition. State University of New York Press. 2017. 

• 2021-2022 - Explore SSHRC/University of Manitoba internal research grant. “Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Landscapes of Memory: Representations of Women’s Piety and Taxonomies of Loss in Sarajevo.”
• 2018-2022 - Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant. “Mystical Messianisms and the End of Religion.” Co-Investigator, Paul Ballanfat, Galatasaray University.
• 2011-2012 - Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) standard research grant. “The Touchstone of the Qur’an: Narrating Visionary Experiences and Interpreting Dreams in the Kubravi Sufi Tradition.”