Meriem El Haitami is a Professor of Gender Studies at Ibn Tofail University, Morocco. Her research addresses the interactions between state and new social and religious reconfigurations in post-2003 Morocco, with particular focus on the role of women in state religious policy and gender reforms. Her most recent research explores the surge of new spiritualities in Morocco and the role of women in shaping new expressions of female and gender subjectivity outside of institutional Islam. El Haitami is a recipient of a number of visiting fellowships including her position as a visiting professor at Columbia University (2021-2022) and Yale University (2015- 2016). Her lecture Women and the Re-casting of the Spiritual in Morocco Was held on 11 December 2023.

David Owen, M.A. Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA

David Owen studies the history of logic in the Western Islamicate world. He is especially interested in formal patterns of reasoning in the legal education of big religious traditions, and especially within the cultural continuum of the Bissau-to-Bilbao complex. In Fall 2023, David will defend his dissertation in Arabic & Islamic Studies at Harvard University, where he has also completed the Secondary Field in Classical Philosophy. The dissertation provides the first treatment of the Avicennan logic of a prominent west Saharan luminary, Ghadīja (Khadīja) Mint (Bint) al-‘Āqil (d. ca. 1835). David currently teaches philosophy and Semitic languages at Christendom College and is a research associate of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Chrisean Understanding at Georgetown University. David holds BA and MA degrees from Columbia University, an MA degree from Harvard University, and was a Fulbright Scholar to Mauritania, Morocco, and Spain.On 13 November 2023, from 4 pm to 6 pm he presented the lecture Ghadīja Mint al-‘Āqil and the Logic Manuscripts of Islamicate West Africa.