Organisers:

Anthony Shay

Anthony Shay is professor of dance and cultural studies at Pomona College. He holds a PhD in Dance History and Theory. His most recent publication: Folk Dance and the Construction of National Identities: Staging the Folk (Palgrave Macmillan), is due in May 2023. He is editor and contributor to Dance in the Persianate World: History Aesthetics, and Performance, (Mazda Publishers) due in Spring 2023

Hakim Elnazarov

Dr Hakim Elnazarov is Head of the Central Asian Studies at the Institute of Ismaili
Studies (IIS). He completed his graduate studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the Tajik State University in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, where he received qualifications in Islamic and Oriental Studies. He then obtained a Master of Education from the Institute for Educational Development (IED) at the Aga Khan University (AKU), Karachi, Pakistan. He received his PhD from King’s College, London in the history of empires, exploring the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia during colonial period.
Languages Yearbook, published by Brill in the UK. He is also engaged in various collaborative projects with academic institutions in Europe, Central Asia and
Russia.

Riaz Rhemtulla

Riaz Rhemtulla is one of the Co-Head of the Department of Education at the Institire of
Ismaili Studies responsible for Teacher Education and Curriculum Development. In this role, Riaz is responsible for working with the Ismaili Tariqa and Religious Education Boards (ITREBs) globally to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and expertise across ITREBs to ensure the effective implementation of the IIS Primary, Secondary and Early Childhood Curricula according to the best academic, educational and practice driven standards. He is also a classical Indian Kathak dancer in the Lucknow gharana style whose journey of training and performance under the tutelage of Padmashri Pratap Pawar has continued over the past two decades.

William Hoffman

Dr William Rees Hofmann’s research explores the connected textual and musical traditions of Nizārī Ismā‘īlī, Sufi, and Bhakti devotion in early modern Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Deccan, as well as histories of musical knowledge in South Asia and larger histories of emotion and the senses. His work also attends to questions of labour and caste in the production of scientific knowledge.

He has published on the musical epistemologies and Afghan biographies of the poet-musician Amīr Ḳhusraw, and the construction of Hindustani music history in Mughal texts, and is currently completing a monograph, tentatively titled Amīr Ḳhusraw and Sufi Ecologies of Song: South Asian Musical Traditions from the Sultanate to Early Mughal Period, under contract with EUP.

Robin Dougherty

Roberta L. Dougherty is the Librarian for Middle East Studies at the Yale University Library. She has numerous presentations and publications on a variety of topics to her credit, from the histories of Arabic printing, American Orientalism, and U.S. collections of Islamic manuscripts, to the social construction of performance and the expressive arts in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt.

Shahrzad Khorsandi

Shahrzad Khorsandi is an Iranian-American choreographer (BA in Dance; MA in Creative Arts). Artistic director of Shahrzad Dance Company, she teaches and performs internationally. Author of The Art of Persian Dance, she is also a member of an international research team, studying the effects of dance on the brain.

Katia Chaterji

Katia Chaterji is an interdisciplinary scholar of Muslim Southeast Asia, and her research centers the shared histories between Islam and the performing arts in Sumatra, Indonesia. Influenced by her classical Odissi dance training, she engages with dance ethnography, oral history, and archival methods in the field to situate an embodied archive of Islamic performing arts. She received her PhD in History from the University of Washington and is an Assistant Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Loyola Marymount University.

María Faidi

PhD Dance

University of Chichester UK

Specialised in belly dance history and aesthetics (raks al-sharki). Egyptian Golden Era Cinema during the colonial modernity period. Other fields of study: Postcolonial Sociology, Pierre Bourdieu, Popular Cinema, Screendance, Egyptian History (19th and 20th centuries), Performing Arts and Cultural Industries of the Middle Eastern and the Mediterranean Area.

MA Political Science Universidad Complutense Madrid SPAIN