Dr. Syafaatun Almirzanah will be teaching at Eastern Mennonite University in the academic year 2016-2017 for two semesters under the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence program (FSIR). In the Fall semester, she will teach Introduction to Islam, which was previously taught by Christian professors, and Women in Islam in the History Department. In the Spring, she will deliver lectures on Islam and Politics in Southeast Asia and join another professor for a Women, Religion, and Social Change course for the Department of Applied Social Sciences. She will partake in other campus activities such as attending faculty meetings and staff conferences, guest-lecturing for several courses delivering Comparative Mysticism, engaging in independent study and mentoring for a graduate student in Indonesian Politics, providing consultation on university collaboration with international universities on distance learning, and exploring a Muslim student support group on campus. She will also have opportunities to speak in local Christian, Jewish, and Muslim houses of worship and local social organizations.
Dr. Almirzanah earned two doctoral degrees: one in comparative theology (PhD) at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago (LSTC) and the other in spirituality (D. Min) from the Catholic Theological Union. Her PhD dissertation compared Muslim and Christian spirituality in the Middle Ages under the title, “When Mystic Masters Meet: Towards a New Matrix for Christian-Muslim Dialogue” under the supervision of Professor Bernard McGinn from the University of Chicago and Professor Scott Alexander from Catholic Theological Union, Chicago. The dissertation was later published under the same title in 2011 by Blue Dome Publication, USA.
In 2011, she was a visiting Associate Professor at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, where she held the Malaysia Center for Islam in Southeast Asia Chair at the Al-Waleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. There, she taught Islam and Politics in Southeast Asia, Sufism in Comparative Perspective, and Interfaith Dialogue. She has also been a visiting professor at the Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, Illinois, where she did graduate work, and a visiting professor of Islamic studies at Sanata Dharma Catholic University in Yogyakarta.
She was trained in classical Arabic, the Qur’an, the classical and contemporary Islamic intellectual tradition, and also trained in comparative religions when she was young. She studied at UIN’s Department of Comparative Religion, where she earned her master’s degree with a thesis entitled, “lbn Khaldun on Sufism.”
She is an Islamic/Religious Studies lecturer at State Islamic University (UIN) Sunan Kalijaga, Yogyakarta.
