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20 NEW CARNEGIE SCHOLARS ANNOUNCED
Grants Enrich Public Discourse on Islam

New York, NY — April 7, 2008. Carnegie Corporation of New York President Vartan Gregorian today named 20 new Carnegie Scholars. The new Scholars were selected for their compelling ideas and commitment to enriching the quality of the public dialogue on Islam. The Corporation provides funding, with two-year grants of up to $100,000, and intellectual support to well-established and promising young thinkers, analysts and writers. The 2008 awardees are the fourth consecutive annual class to focus on Islam, bringing to 91 the number of Carnegie Scholars devoted to the topic since the program began in 2000.

Commenting on the 2008 Carnegie Scholars and the program’s current focus on Islam, Gregorian said, “We are cultivating a diverse scholarly community spanning a range of disciplines with the expectation that their voices will help Americans develop a more complex understanding of Muslim societies here and throughout the world—revealing Islam’s rich diversity. Only through vibrant dialogue, guided by bold and nuanced scholarship, can we move public thinking into new territory.”

The 2008 Scholars are drawn from a number of disciplines and represent public universities, liberal arts colleges and traditional research universities. The projects they will pursue during their two-year scholarship include examinations of: Muslim immigrants’ influence on the development of Islam as an African American religious tradition; Jewish and Muslim accommodations to modernity in Europe and the United States; the disjunction between Islam’s view of resource distribution and the exploitation of oil revenues by Muslim political elites; and how American and British media used Islam and Muslims to frame their coverage of terrorism since September, 11, 2001. (Names of all 2008 Carnegie Scholars are provided below)

The Carnegie Scholars program allows independent-minded thinkers to pursue original projects oriented toward catalyzing intellectual discourse as well as guiding more focused and pragmatic policy discussions. Scholars are selected not only for their originality and proven intellectual capacity, but for their demonstrated ability to communicate their ideas in ways that can catalyze public discourse.

The Carnegie Scholars program was established by Vartan Gregorian in 1999 to provide financial and intellectual support to writers, analysts and thinkers addressing some of the most critical research questions of our time. By identifying and investing in some of the brightest and most innovative contemporary thinkers, Carnegie Corporation seeks to inform its own programs as well as to advance and diffuse knowledge that will uplift our nation and humanity. Since 2005, the program has supported scholars whose work seeks to promote American understanding of Islam as a religion, the characteristics of Muslim societies, in general, and those of American Muslim communities, in particular.

Patricia L. Rosenfield, who leads the Carnegie Scholars Program said, “America’s discourse on Islam will benefit from the Scholars’ enthusiastic quest to transform complex information into useful, structured knowledge. Their superb scholarship is often daring, always accessible and truly public.” Rosenfield said that emerging and established scholars alike are encouraged to orient their writing and speaking beyond purely academic audiences.

Financial support for emerging scholars—those who are refining their voices and building their bodies of work—is especially important as it helps validate credibility and serves as an investment that yields considerable benefits later to the scholarly community. However crucial, financial support is not the only form of support provided to Scholars. The Corporation provides them entrée into its various networks, including an active community of past Scholars, and offers professional development, such as workshops aimed at improving their capacity to communicate their scholarship to broad audiences.

Every year since 2000, Carnegie Corporation of New York selects as many as 20 Carnegie Scholars following a rigorous and highly competitive process. Nominations are invited from more than 500 nominators representing a broad range of disciplines and institutions, including academia, research institutes, non profit organizations, the media and foundations. Nominators are asked to identify original thinkers who have the ability—or promise—to spark academic and public debate, and whose work transcends academic boundaries.

A detailed project proposal and multi-step review process, utilizing Carnegie Corporation officers and external reviewers, identifies as finalists those nominees who offer a combination of original scholarship, past accomplishments, potential for impact on the field and capacity to communicate to the broader public and policymakers.

About Carnegie Corporation of New York
Carnegie Corporation of New York was created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to promote “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.” For more than 95 years the Corporation has carried out Carnegie’s vision of philanthropy by building on his two major concerns: international peace and advancing education and knowledge. As a private grantmaking foundation, the Corporation will invest more than $100 million this year in nonprofits to fulfill Mr. Carnegie's mission, “to do real and permanent good in this world.” The Corporation’s capital fund, originally donated at a value of about $135 million, had a market value of $3.07 billion on September 30, 2007.

A complete list of 2008 Carnegie Scholars is provided on the following page.
Abstracts of each Scholar’s project can be found at www.carnegie.org

2008 Carnegie Scholars
Project titles

Hussein Ali Agrama, University of Chicago, State Power and Islamic Authority:
A Comparative Ethnography of the Fatwa

Hisham Aidi, Columbia University,Identity, Inclusion and Muslim Youth

Anna Bigelow, North Carolina State University, Holy Ground: Strategies of Sharing Islamic Sacred Spaces

Laurie Brand, University of Southern California, Islam vs. Nationalism in Arab State Post-Independence Narratives

Kanchan Chandra, New York University, Islam and Democracy:
The Effect of Institutions

Nora Ann Colton, Drew University,The Migration of Islamist Militancy to Urban Poverty Belts in the Middle East

Edward E. Curtis IV, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, The Transnational History of African American Islam

Leila Fawaz, Tufts University, The Experience of War: Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia, 1914-1920

Michael Gasper, Yale University, Re-Thinking Secularism and Sectarianism in the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990

Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College, The Monotheistic Triangle: Judaism and Islam in the Modern Christian World

Bruce B. Lawrence, Duke University, Christian and Muslim Minorities as Secular Citizens in Africa and Asia

Miriam R. Lowi, The College of New Jersey, Islam and Oil: The Economy of Meaning

Susan D. Moeller, University of Maryland, Framing Islam: How Media Cover Muslims & Terrorism—and Why That Matters

Tahera Qutbuddin, University of Chicago, Classical Arabic Oratory:The Politics and Rhetoric of Public Address in the Islamic World

Sadiq Reza, New York Law School, Due Process in Islamic Criminal Law

Amr A. Shalakany, The American University in Cairo, The Redefinition of Shari'a in Modern Egyptian Legal Thought:1798-Present

Paul A. Silverstein, Reed College, The Ethnic Politics of Muslim Secularism: North Africa
at the Crossroads

Monica Duffy Toft, Harvard University, Religion, Islam and Civil Wars

Muhammad S. Umar, Northwestern University, Pragmatism and Pluralism in the Traditional Islamic Thought of al-Shaykh Ibrahim Saleh of Nigeria

Ashutosh Varshney, University of Michigan, Ethnocommunal Conflict, Civil Society and the State