Brannon Ingram

  Assistant Professor in Islamic Studies
  Department of Religious Studies
  Office: Crowe Hall, 5-159,1860 Campus Drive
  Phone: 847-467-4170
  E-mail: brannon.ingram@northwestern.edu
  Office Hours: Tuesday 2-3pm
  Thursdays 3-4:00pm (Spring 2013)

 

Brannon Ingram is a specialist in Islamic Studies, with a focus on Sufism and modern South Asia. He received his B.A. from Reed College, his M.A. in Islamic Studies from Leiden University, and his Ph.D. in Religious Studies (2011) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joins Northwestern after a year as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wheaton College.

Brannon’s research engages with transnational and translocal flows of people, texts and ideas in the global Muslim South (particularly between South Asia and Southern Africa), and how these flows have upended traditional forms and structures of authority in Islam. His current research examines how the global Deobandi network of Islamic seminaries (madrasas) have shaped debates about Sufism and Islamic ethics, how Deobandi scholars sought to implement their reformist vision of Islam in the public sphere via popular texts written for a lay Muslim audience, and how the Tablighi Jama`at (now the world’s largest Muslim revivalist organization) emerged out of Deoband’s reformist project. Other research interests include the history of Western representations of the ‘mystical’ in Islam, particularly in the context of colonial India. His research has been supported by the Fulbright and the Social Science Research Council, among other organizations.

His teaching interests include the introduction to Islam, Sufism, the Qur’an, Islamic Reform and Revivalism, and Islamic South Asia.

 

Selected Works

"The Portable Madrasa: Print, Publics, and the Authority of the Deobandi 'Ulama," Modern Asian Studies, forthcoming, 2013.

 

“Sufis, Scholars and Scapegoats: Rashid Ahmad Gangohi and the Deobandi Critique of Sufism,” The Muslim World 99, 3 (2009): 478 – 501.

 

“René Guénon and the Traditionalist Polemic,” in Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds. Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and its Others, Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2007: 201 – 226.