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Ruth Mas, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, has been awarded a fellowship at The Society for the Humanities at Cornell University for the 2009-10 academic year.

She was chosen because of the work she conducts on contemporary Islam and the politics of the secularization of affect. Her research project is titled “Traveling Barbarity and Mobilized Traditions: The Disaffection of Secular Islam.”

She will also teach a graduate seminar titled “Secular Disaffections: On Islam and the Politics of Emotion.”

The course will focus in part on the categories of “religion” and “the secular,” she said. “Beginning with an examination of the relationship of knowledge to power, it questions the employment of normative concepts associated with the rise of the modern nation-state, secularism and liberal political rule to speak about Islam and Muslims in post-colonial and/or secular societies.”

“More specifically,” she added, “the course will examine the relationship of sentiments, feelings, emotions and affect to the structures of force associated with secular models of politics that purport to banish religion from their sphere.”

Cornell’s Society for the Humanities was established in 1966 and is one of the first humanities institutes in North America. The society brings distinguished visiting fellows and Cornell faculty and graduate student fellows together each year to pursue research on a broadly interdisciplinary focal theme.

Fellows are chosen to contribute to their mandate to foster innovative interdisciplinary and theoretical reflection. Besides participating in a Wednesday seminar, fellows offer one experimental, innovative seminar on their research topic.

The theme of this year’s fellowships is “Networks/Mobilities,” a focus that aims to further understanding of historical and contemporary flows of peoples, materials, images, and ideas across physical and virtual boundaries.

The Society for the Humanities’ senior scholars in residence will be Keller Easterling, associate professor of architecture at Yale University; and Brian Massumi, professor of communications at the University of Montreal.