Gender and Religion: A conversation about two books with two authors

Dr. Justine Howe and Dr. Jue Liang will be in conversation with each other about their newly published books, both of which explore the relationship between gender and religion in fresh and fascinating ways. Dr. Howe's latest book Maryam Jameelah and the Global Muslim Imagination (Princeton, 2026) explores the unlikely journey of Maryam Jameelah (1934-2012) - born Margaret Marcus in White Plains, New York - from comfortable suburban childhood to influential voice of the twentieth-century global Islamic Revival. Jameelah's more than twenty books and pamphlets, translated into a dozen languages, were notable for their unrelenting critique of modernity and arguments for the superiority of Islam in opposition to the West. The book shows how Jameelah harnessed negative emotions to call attention to what she saw as the catastrophes wrought by materialism and secularism. For Jameelah, galvanizing these emotions formed the basis of global Muslim solidarity that could be mobilized for a reinvigorated Islamic future. Dr. Liang is the author of Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel ( Oxford University Press in 2026), the first comprehensive study dedicated to the literary tradition surrounding Yeshe Tsogyel, the foremost matron saint of Tibetan Buddhism. The book traces the emergence and development of a rich body of narratives about Yeshe Tsogyel during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing on the Tibetan Nyingma Buddh