For a PDF version of the conference program click here.

Friday May 4 - The National Humanities Center

Welcome (9:00  - 9:15 AM) a Akram Khater (North Carolina State University)

Session I (9:15 – 12:15) a The Means and Meanings of Knowledge: Missionary Educational Endeavors

  • Ellen Fleischmann (University of Dayton). "Under an American Roof:" the Founding of the American Junior College for Women.

  • Aleksandra Majstorac Kobiljski (CUNY – Graduate Center). Learning to be Modern: Missionary universities and the formation of secular modernity in Lebanon and Japan, 1860s-1880s

  • Paul Sedra (Simon Fraser University). Evangelical Missionaries and the Development of an Egyptian Modernity in Education

  • Commentator: Lisa Pollard (UNC Wilmington)

Lunch: 12:15 – 1:45 PM                                                                        

Session II (1:45 – 4:45 PM) a Christian Domesticity and Motherhood

  • Christine Linder (University of Edinburgh). The Flexibility of Home: Home and Family As Imagined by the Missionaries in Ottoman Syria from 1823

  • Nancy L. Stockdale (University of North Texas). Schools of Industry and Mothers Meetings: Late Ottoman Encounters between British and Palestinian Women.

  • Commentator: David Ambaras (North Carolina State University)

Saturday, May 5 - The National Humanities Center

Session III (9:00 – 12:00 AM) a The Marginal Center: Gender and Missionaries

  • Akram Khater (North Carolina State University). “God called me to be free”: Latin missionaries, Aleppan nuns and the transformation of Middle Eastern Catholicism

  • Beth Baron (CUNY – Graduate Center). Talking in Tongues: Lillian Trasher, the Asyut Orphanage, and Pentecostals on the Nile

  • Eleanor Doumato (Brown University). Joyful Death: The Romance of Americans in Mission to the Nestorians

  • Commentator: Rudi Mathee (University of Delaware)

Lunch: 12:00 –1:30 PM

Session IV (1:30 –4:30) a Colonialism, Nationalism, Capitalism and Missionaries

  • Heather J. Sharkey (University of Pennsylvania). Egyptian Nationalism, Religious Liberty, and the Re-Thinking of the American Mission, 1918-1945.

  • Michael Marten (University of London) Rethinking the links between colonialism, missionary endeavour and capitalism.

  • Michael Zirinsky (Boise State University). “Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Will Make You Free”:  American Presbyterians and Iran 

  • Commentator: Robert Tignor (Princeton University)

Coffee Break – 4:30 – 5:00 PM

Session V (5:00 PM – 5:30 PM) a Wrap-up