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August 24, 2006

Library of Congress to Hold Conference Sept. 8 on "Islamic Culture and Creative Encounters"

The Library of Congress will hold a conference on “Islamic Culture and Creative Encounters” from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 8, in Room 119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C.

The event will feature scholars who had participated in Rockefeller Foundation fellowships in Islamic studies at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center during the past five years. The postdoctoral fellowships supported research in the humanities on globalization and Muslim societies.

The conference, sponsored by the Kluge Center, is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

The Rockefeller Foundation fellows will reflect upon their experiences at the Library, summarize their research findings and discuss the insights that have emerged. They will look at the cultural encounters within various Muslim societies and the exchanges between Muslim and non-Muslim societies.

Eight of the 10 Rockefeller fellows will speak. Additional participants will include George Saliba, professor of Arabic and Islamic Science in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, and Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity and professor of history at Yale University.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate, energize and distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the fellowships, grants and programs offered by the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge.

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PR 06-159
08/24/06
ISSN 0731-3527

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