Assistant Professor in Critical Media and Communication Studies at McMaster University
B.A. M.A. (Sofia, Bulgaria), Ph.D. (Trent)
Thesis: The Politics of Muslim Intellectual Discourse in the West: the Emergence of a Western-Islamic Public Sphere
Examining Committee:
Davide Panagia (Supervisor), John Fekete, Andrew Wernick
External Examiner: Simone Chambers, University of Toronto
Internal Examiner: Nadine Changfoot
Chair: Veronica Hollinger
Abstract
The dissertation explores and defends the theory and practice of a Western-Islamic public sphere (which is secular but not secularist and which is Islamic but not Islamist), within which a critical Islamic intellectual universe can unfold, dealing hermeneutically with texts and politically with lived practices, and which, moreover, has to emerge from within the arc of two alternative, conflicting, yet equally dismissive suspicions defined by a view that critical Islam is the new imperial rhetoric of hegemonic orientalism and the opposite view that critical Islam is just fundamentalism camouflaged in liberal rhetoric. The Western-Islamic public sphere offers a third view, arising from ethical commitment to intellectual work, creativity, and imagination as a portal to the open horizons of history.
Dilyana Mincheva is a graduate of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria, with a B.A. degree in Cultural Studies (B.A. honours thesis: Arab Nationalism – between Religion and the Nation State, 2006) and an MA degree in Arabic Studies (M.A. honours thesis: Islam and the European Public Sphere: the Crisis of Multiculturalism, 2008). Dilyana’s interest in Islam and the debates around its sometimes problematic inscription in western secular contexts, developed during continuous studying and traveling in Western Europe and the Middle East, has determined her current dissertational focus on Islam and the public sphere at Trent University. Dilyana has published on the heated French-English debates about secularism and religious expression, and has also presented her research at a number of conferences in Bulgaria, Germany and France. Her lasting engagement with women’s liberty and artistic expression in the Islamic world was acknowledged in 2008 with an honorary award from the Bulgarian University Women’s Association for an essay on the oeuvre of Kuwaiti artist Suraya al-Baqsami. Away from the public space and vanity of academia, in the privacy of her personal obsessions with art, Dilyana experiments with creative writing and playing both guitar and cello.