Tales of Trickery and Endurance: Gender, Performance, and Politics in the Islamic World and Beyond, a Conference in Honor of Margaret Mills

Organized by the Center for Folklore Studies with generous support from the
Division of the Arts and Humanities, the Mershon Center for International Security
Studies, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Professor Margaret Mills, retiring in June 2012 from the Department of Near Eastern
Languages and Cultures, has made major contributions to the study of women in
contemporary Afghanistan, the folklore of the Persian-speaking world and South
Asia, women’s oral traditions, and traditional pedagogies. She has helped us to
think about the rhetorical dimension of oral traditions; the gendering of religious
experience; the partitioning of the traditional public sphere into gendered and
performative situations; how literacies and pedagogies are mobilized to form political
identities; how individual and collective expressive repertoires respond to war
and displacement.

This conference assembles some of her former students and long term colleagues
to discuss new developments in these lines of research.

Expected participants include:

Joyce Burkhalter-Flueckiger (Religon, Emory)
Cati Coe (Anthropology, Rutgers-Camden)
Yücel Demirer (Political Science, Kocaeli U, Turkey)
Ben Gatling (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, NYU)
Deborah Kapchan (Performance Studies, NYU)
Derya Keskin (Education, Kocaeli U, Turkey)
Frank Korom (Religion and Anthropology, Boston U)
Ulrich Marzolph (Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Göttingen)
Susan Niditch (Religious Studies, Amherst)
Ruth Olson (Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, UWMadison)
Arzu Öztürkmen (History, Boğaziçi U, Turkey)
Leela Prasad (Ethics and Religious Studies, Duke)
Scott Reese (History, Northern Arizona)
Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies, UC-Santa Barbara)
Susan Slyomovics (Anthropology and Near Eastern, UCLA)
Meltem Türkoz (Humanities and Social Sciences, Işık U, Turkey)
Susan Wadley (South Asian Studies, Syracuse)
Bill Westerman (American Folklife Center Green Fellow)

For further information contact organizer Dorothy Noyes <noyes.10@osu.edu> or
Acting CFS Director Ray Cashman <cashman.10@osu.edu>.