New Hire in REL at UA

The Department of Religious Studies, in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Alabama, is very pleased to announce the hire of Dr. Edith Szanto. She begins at UA in the Fall semester of 2019, as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, with expertise in the area of social theory of Islam.

Dr. Szanto has been teaching in the Social Sciences Department at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, since 2011. She received her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto in 2012.  She has extensive international experience and works on questions relating to bodies, violence, politics, and Islam in Syria and Iraq.  She has also worked on Twelver Shi’i women’s seminaries, self-flagellation rituals, ecstatic Sufi practices, spiritual healing, and Middle Eastern television. Most recently, she has been studying religious reactions to ISIS in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Dr. Szanto will be teaching REL 236 in the Fall, our Core Curriculum intro course on Islam, and will be available to supervise M.A. students interested in using the study of Islam as a site to explore the application of social theory in the study of religion. She will also be assisting with the development of cross-disciplinary Mid-East Studies at UA.

We are very pleased to be adding Dr. Szanto to the faculty.