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Nancy Khalek

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies:
Religious Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 3397
Nancy_Khalek@brown.edu

Biography

Nancy Khalek is Assistant professor of Religious Studies and specializes in Islam in the early classical period. She received her PhD in history from Princeton University in 2006. She is interested in issues of identity, narrative and authority in the transitional period from late antiquity to early Islam. In addition to her focus on the formative period of Islamic history, other interests include hagiography and historiography in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, relic and saint veneration, Christian-Muslim dialogue, and the relationship of material culture to religious life. Professor Khalek has conducted field and survey work in Syria, Turkey and Greece. She is currently working on a book on Damascus in the Umayyad era.

Teaching

The courses I teach range from introductory surveys on Islamic religion and practice to upper-level seminars on religion and society in the early Islamic period. Using a combination of primary and scholarly materials, students are given the tools with which to approach the salient questions in a discipline of study, as well as the substantive material specifically related to a particular topic.