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The Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University will host a graduate student conference that examines how modern states exist in tension with the practices, institutions, and sensibilities associated with Islam. This interdisciplinary conference will draw together advanced graduate students and senior scholars to probe the enduring entanglement of religion and modernity, and to understand how this entanglement bears on contemporary debates about modern statehood.Panels will investigatehow states grapple with nationalism, neo-liberalism, and secularism in relation to local and global iterations of Islam;the strategies that individuals and communities employ to subvert, comply with, or otherwise amend state sovereignty and its projects to cultivate ideal citizens;and the modes through which the Islamic tradition is being transformed as a result of these processes.http://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/grad-conference/index.htmlGraduate Student ParticipationWe welcome papers that address the conference theme in comparative and international perspective. Advanced graduate students are invited to submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by November 9, 2015.Applicants will be informed of the outcome of the selection process by December 4, 2015. Selected applicants will be asked to submit their papers of no more than 10,000 words in length by March 4, 2016.The Buffett Institute will subsidize travel costs and provide hotel accommodations for conference participants.Faculty InvolvementThe keynote address will be given by Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame with appointments in the Department of History and the Kroc Institute for International Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs.The following faculty will provide comments on the conference papers:Alireza Doostdar (University of Chicago Divinity School)Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto Faculty of Law)Mayanthi Fernando (Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz)Haider Ala Hamoudi (University of Pittsburgh School of Law)Naveeda Khan (Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University)Rudolph Ware (History, University of Michigan)Conference OrganizersMona Oraby is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. Her research investigates the legal regulation and administration of religious difference in the contemporary Middle East.Bilal Nasir is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology and part of the Initiative for Comparative Race and Diaspora at Northwestern University. His research examines the intersection between racialization, social movements, and Islamic learning among Muslim youth in the greater Los Angeles area.Nathaniel Mathews is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Northwestern University. He works on the history of modern citizenship, ethnicity and the nation-state in Zanzibar, Oman and the Swahili Coast.Nurhaizatul Jamil is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on Muslim women’s participation in Islamic self-help classes in contemporary Singapore.For inquiries regarding this event, please contact buffettgradconference@northwestern.edu.