In new memoir, IU professor reflects on growing up in Africa, as a person between two worlds
From the age of 3, Carol Claxon Polsgrove has been a person between two worlds. As a child, she accompanied her parents from Kentucky to West Africa, where they served as Baptist missionaries. After a dozen years of growing up mostly in Nigeria, she returned to the United States, where many people thought that experience […]
IU’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures has ‘never been more relevant’
EDITOR’S NOTE: The origins of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures were the subject of a previous article. Today, as the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures in Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies celebrates its 50th anniversary, there were moments when that milestone seemed less certain. In 1979, at […]
Panel at IU Bloomington will discuss U.S. news media’s coverage of Islam and Muslims
Millions worldwide join the Japanese people in mourning the latest victim beheaded by Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Muslims in France and elsewhere decry the recent attack on satire magazine Charlie Hebdo by extremists. Militant Islamist group Boko Haram has created havoc in Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, through a series of bombings, assassinations […]
IU’s Muslim Voices celebrates the “Feast of the Sacrifice” and 25,000 Twitter followers
During the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East, the microblogging service Twitter was at the epicenter of those events, as millions of people followed minute-by-minute updates and firsthand reports from users to the rest of the world. Among the Twitter feeds relaying many of those reports was Muslim Voices, a joint project between Indiana […]
Professor works to dispel misunderstandings about Islam through her research
Say the word “jihad,” and it often conjures up all kinds of negative imagery. But according to Asma Afsaruddin, chair and professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington, it’s a word that has many different meanings for Muslims. In Arabic, “jihad” translates […]
