Maroun El Houkayem,

Maroun El Houkayem is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Religion. His major is Early Christianity, and he has minors in Middle Eastern Studies and Religion and Modernity. His work studies the social contexts and intellectual currents that drove scholars to seek out manuscripts from the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It demonstrates how the moving and appropriation of manuscripts to construct academic fields of study are inscribed in social networks and power relations that spread outside the academy. 

His dissertation tentatively titled "Gathering the Orient: Manuscripts, Collectors, and Religion," looks at case studies of foundational collectors of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts in the United Kingdom, France, and Lebanon.This project seeks not only to retrace the trajectories of these objects, but also to analyze how they shaped the self-representation and image of their custodians and informed prevailing discourses about colonialism, nationalism, and religion. Each case study illustrates how ostensibly scientific or secular practices surrounding manuscripts reinforce the separation between heritage communities and academic ones.

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Keywords:

Archives • Feminist theory • Late Antiquity • Manuscripts • Manuscripts, Syriac • Orientalism

Recent Publications

1. El Houkayem, M, Opening the Closet, Bulletin for the Study of Religion, vol. 53 no. 2 (August, 2024), pp. 50-54, Equinox Publishing [doi]  [abs]
2. El Houkayem, M, Orientalism, Disorientation, and the “Other Side of the World”, Studies in Late Antiquity, vol. 7 no. 2 (May, 2023), pp. 171-183, University of California Press [doi]  [abs]