Saba Mahmood is an anthropologist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and whose work raises challenging questions about…
Deathless questions and other interviews
At a lull of conversation in class, the poet Robert Creeley would ask his students, “Any more deathless questions?” It is no easy invitation to follow; doing so might seem to imply that one’s question is weighty enough to be immortal, or challenging enough that it could never be met with an answer. Yet Creeley—as much a poet of “the things themselves” as anyone—wouldn’t be disappointed with the apparently ordinary. Those questions too, he meant to say, carry within themselves the infinite.
This TIF interview series presents conversations with some of the leading scholars, activists, and public intellectuals who are changing how we think about the lines between sacred and secular. Like Creeley’s invitation, their work is a challenge to reconfigure familiar categories, to take old questions of meaning, politics, and conflict, and ask them again in new ways.
Read Nathan Schneider’s interviews with Mark Lilla and David Kyuman Kim at ssrc.org.
The suspicious revolution: An interview with Talal Asad
Not long after his return from Cairo, where he was doing fieldwork, I spoke with Talal Asad at the City…
The Rubicon is in Egypt: An interview with Azza Karam
Azza Karam is the Senior Culture Advisor at the United Nations Population Fund, where she has pioneered efforts to make…
Reading the paranormal writing us: An interview with Jeffrey Kripal
Jeffrey Kripal, who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University, is an authority on the mysterious. His books…
Implicated and enraged: An interview with Judith Butler
Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is among the leading social theorists alive today. Her most…
The science of people power: An interview with Gene Sharp
Gene Sharp is the foremost strategist of nonviolent social change alive today. He holds a doctorate in political theory from…
What is Oprah?: An interview with Kathryn Lofton
In Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, just out from University of California Press, Yale religion professor Kathryn Lofton orchestrates…
Greedy time: An interview with Patrick Lee Miller
Patrick Lee Miller is an assistant professor of philosophy at Duquesne University and the author of Becoming God: Pure Reason…
Endgame capitalism: An interview with Simon During
Simon During is a professor at the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland, having…
More than politics: An interview with Charles Villa-Vicencio
As National Research Director for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Charles Villa-Vicencio was intimately involved in the historic…