Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) writes and teaches about political culture, political theory, international relations, and foreign policy. She specializes in relations between Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Her first book, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, was published by Princeton University Press in 2008. Arguing that secularist divisions between religion and politics are not fixed, as commonly assumed, but socially and historically constructed, the book examines the philosophical and historical legacies of two secularist traditions that shape European and American approaches to global politics. It then examines the impact of these varieties of secularism upon relations between the United States and Iran, and the European Union and Turkey. Recent articles include “Political Islam and foreign policy in Europe and the United States,” Foreign Policy Analysis (2007), “Theorizing religious resurgence,” International Politics (2007), and “Negotiating Europe: The politics of religion and the prospects for Turkish accession to the EU,” Review of International Studies (2006).
Henri Matisse Porte de la Casbah 1912-1913
Professor Hurd is developing a new book-length project that will examine the role of, and interactions between, political theology, law, and religion in international politics. She is also working on contributions for several edited volumes on secularism, religion, and international affairs. Hurd is a member of the Social Science Research Council Working Group on Religion, Secularism, and International Affairs and the project on Religion, the Secular and Democracy at the ASU Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, funded by the Ford Foundation. At Northwestern she is a co-convenor of the Middle East and North African Studies Working Group, which has as its objective the reconsideration of the field of Middle East studies on intellectual and programmatic grounds after the critique of area studies. Hurd has taught courses on the politics of secularism, religion and international politics, the Middle East in international relations, US foreign policy, and nationalism. In 2004-2005 she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and in spring 2009 she will be visiting faculty at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.