Professor Angie Heo of the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Connaught Initiative: Entangled Worlds Visiting Fellow, 2020, will be giving a talk on January 30th from 12:00pm to 2:00pm in seminar room 318 in the Religion Department, Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George St.
“Redemption at the Edge“, based in part on her book, The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (University of California Press, 2018).
Pilgrimage to the Holy Lands turns on ritual imaginaries of space and time along with material sensations of mobility. In this forum, Prof. Heo will explore Coptic Orthodox traditions of travel and the Coptic politics of sharing saints with Roman Catholics and Arab Muslims. Focusing on the historical period of Arab nationalism in the 1960s, she will further examine how the geopolitics of war and anticolonial identity shaped the sacred geography of Egypt relative to Palestine, Israel, and Ethiopia. Ultimately, this forum’s discussion will address critical intersections of holy boundaries and state borders, drawing together epistemologies of space with political questions of unity and difference.