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Ruth Mas
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Assistant Professor, Religious
Studies Department
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Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2006
Contact Information
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Humanities 253
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303-492-6358
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Primary Teaching Areas and
Opportunities for Student Supervision
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Contemporary Islam, Islam in
Europe, Islam in France
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Cultures of Islam, Media and
Politics
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Liberalism, Secularism,
Political Theology
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Postructuralist, Postcolonial
and Critical Theory
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Theories of Gender,
Subjectivity, and Affect
Significant Publications
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“Secular Couplings: Métissage
and the Regeneration of Islam and Muslim Subjectivity in Postcolonial
France.” New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the
Twentieth Century, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Forthcoming
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Europe of Love: Re-Centring
Intercultural Affairs, Special Edited Essay Collection, with Luisa
Passerini, European Review of History, (11) 2, (2004).
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“Qiyas: A Study in Islamic Logic,” Folia Orientalia,
(Summer 1998), 113- 128.
  
Overview
Ruth Mas was born in Madrid,
Spain and was raised in Montreal, Canada. While completing a B.A. degree
in French-English Translation, she found herself traveling through
Europe and Morocco and decided to pursue graduate studies in the field
of Islam and Religion. After thorough training in classical Islamic thought with Michael E. Marmura and other scholars, she specialized in the thought of contemporary secular-liberal Muslim intellectuals.
Her dissertation, “Margins of Tawhid: Liberalism and the Discourse of
Plurality in Contemporary Islamic Thought,” was completed in 2006 under
the supervision of Charles Hirschkind and James DiCenso. It draws on the
work of Michel Foucault, Talal Asad and Judith Butler to think through
the question of the constitution of modern Islamic subjects, and issues
of secular-liberal governance and contemporary Islam in France.
Ruth Mas’ focus on critical and
interdisciplinary thinking was recognized by Massey College at the
University of Toronto in 2002, when she was awarded the Morris Wayman
Prize for Interdisciplinary Research for her work on liberalism and
Islam. In 2003 and 2004 she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the
Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities, Essen, Germany,
where she joined an interdisciplinary research group, “Europe: Emotions,
Identities, Politics,” directed by Luisa Passerini. In 2007, she was
invited to Berlin as a Visiting Scholar by the Department of Social and
Cultural Anthropology at Viadrina University.
Most recently, she has pursued her
critical and theoretical approach to the study of Islam at Cornell
University’s School of Criticism and Theory in Ann Stoler’s Seminar “The
Logos and Pathos of Empire: Durabilities of Matter and Mind.” She has also participated in the Seminar in Experimental Critical
Theory, Cartographies of the Theological Political at the University of California, Irvine. Her current
work focuses on the connections between liberalism and affect, and their
implications for Muslim subjects.
Ruth Mas is a 2008-2009 Fellow at the Centre for Humanities and the Arts at CU-Boulder for the project "Apocalyptic Sensibilities in the Futures Past of Secular Liberal Islam." Also the 2007-2008 recipient in the CU-Boulder IGP Seed Grant Program for the project "Transnational Discourses of the Global Islamic Community," Ruth Mas shares project leadership with Carla Jones of the Department of Anthropology.
Courses Taught
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RLST 3600 Islam
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RLST 4800 Critical Studies in Religion
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RLST 5820 Gender, Sexuality, Modernity and Islam
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RLST 5860 Islam and Modernity
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RLST 5820 Secularism and Political Theology
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RLST 5820 Islam and the Politics of Affect
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