Nostalgia reconstructs the past. Derived from Greek nostos (to return) and algos (yearning or suffering), nostalgia not only yearns for the by-gone but reshapes it. Nostalgic retelling of times and places takes on a life of its own. Time in nostalgic remembering is neither linear or cyclical. Space through the lens of nostalgia is wherever one yearns to return to. Questions about nostalgia pervade the fundamental conversations in the study of religion – the formation of sacred geographies and temporalities, origin stories and timeless traditions, communities and lineages, exile and displacement, etc. This conference brings together graduate researchers in religion and related fields to consider questions of temporality and utopia; place-making and sacred landscape; memory, post-memory, and oral history; and traditionalism, textual interpretation, and authority.
Nostalgia
A Religious Studies Graduate Student Conference
April 10 -11, 2026
Keynote Speaker
Professor Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Georgetown University
Friday, April 10th at 6pm | Friedman Hall Room 108
Shenila Khoja-Moolji holds the Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Endowed Chair of Muslim Societies at Georgetown University. Her research explores how gender, race, religion, and power intersect in the lives of Muslim communities in South Asia and North America, with particular attention to experiences of displacement and community formation.
She is the author of Forging the Ideal Educated Girl (University of California Press), Sovereign Attachments (University of California Press), Rebuilding Community (Oxford University Press), The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood (University of Minnesota Press), and Thinking Past Crisis (New York University Press, forthcoming). Her books have received multiple national and international awards from bodies such as the International Studies Association, the American Academy of Religion, the Association for Feminist Anthropology, the Comparative and International Education Society, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies.
In addition to monographs, her research has appeared in flagship journals such as, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Journal of the American Academy of Religion; Feminist Theory; Policy & Society; Comparative Education Review; Gender and Education; and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.
Schedule of Events
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Travel Information
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