The NELC department is proud to announce that Christopher Prejean has been awarded a two-year Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship for his work The Hermeneutical Christian in Islamic Legal Thought. His project discusses what can be learned about Muslims from their legal discussions about Christians.
Prejean received his MA in Arabic here in the NELC department in 2016, and will complete his Ph.D., during which he began his research on this project, at UCLA this June. As a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Haifa, he will expand his research with the aim of understanding how legal works of the Ḥanbalī School of Law perpetuate and construct a characterization of Christians. In doing so, he seeks to understand how Christians serve a larger moral, philosophical, or theological purpose as legal subjects of Islamic law. His work transcends field-specific studies, making accessible the tools from the study of Christianity to the field of Islamic studies.
More information about this year’s Fulbright Fellows can be found at https://fulbright.org.il/node/459.