Erin Atwell

Erin Atwell is a PhD Candidate in classical Arabic literature and anthropology at the University of Chicago, where she works on intersections of classical Islamic texts, contemporary Muslim practices, and forms of modern power. Her research interests span contemporary Islamic ethics, early Arabic literature, religion and atheism, embodiment and bodily practices, temporalities of religious traditions, and theological anthropology. Erin’s dissertation argues that in disparate times and places Islamic expressions of godfearingness - having taqwā - come to index ruptures, shifts and unexpected continuities in societal orientations towards God. Through textual and ethnographic research that tacks between the advent of Islam and contemporary Egyptian religious institutions, she theorizes godfearingness today as an embodied and material activation of a connection between individual interiority and external action established in the earliest days of Islam. While secularization processes in the present at once shrink the space for discourse on godfearingness and judge that discourse as provincial or obsolete, her dissertation project argues for the continued relevance of godfearingness as a contemporary analytic with potential to elucidate alternatives to entrenched social and political processes.