Prof. Dr. Noah Salomon

Short Bio

Noah Salomon is Associate Professor of Religion and Irfan and Noreen Galaria Research Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Virginia. While at Bayreuth, he will work on two related research projects, both exploring the fate of religion in post-Revolutionary Sudan (2019 to present).  In the first, Salomon will study the rekindling of interest in Sudan’s ancient Kushite past in the literary and artistic imagination of Sudanese insurgents who are seeking to reconstitute the nation in new terms following the overthrow of its long-standing Islamist government. This project, tentatively titled, “What Lies Beneath the Sands: History and Religion in Revolutionary Sudan,” is one part of a larger research agenda funded by a three-year New Directions Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that looks at questions of Islam, the management of difference, and the challenge of popular sovereignty across several locations in the Middle East and Africa.  In the second project, Salomon will be exploring debates occasioned by the recent de-Islamization of the criminal law that took place in Sudan in the months since the post-revolutionary government came to power. The essay is intended as the “Law” chapter for the new edition of Critical Terms for Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Press, forthcoming in 2022.

Selected Publications

• -“Moments in Revolutionary Time,” Journal of Middle East Law and Governance 12, December 2020.
• -“What Lies Beneath the Sands: Archeologies of Presence in Revolutionary Sudan,” Africa and the Middle East: Beyond the Divides (Project on Middle East Political Science [POMEPS] Studies), 40.
• -“New Histories for an Uncharted Future in Sudan,” Africa is a Country, May 17, 2019.
• -For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2016.

To access the lecture by Prof. Dr. Salomon, please click here.