Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West

Elizabeth Williams — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 23:12:49 +0000

Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West Elizabeth Williams Thu, 01/22/2026 - 16:12

Wednesday, February 4 at 5pm
ENVD 134

In an upcoming event, Prof. Max Perry Mueller (University of Nebraska Lincoln) and Forrest Cuch (Northern Ute) will discuss Prof. Mueller's recent book Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West.

From the book: The Native American leader Wakara (ca. 1815-1855) was among the most influential and feared men in the 19th century American West. In Wakara’s America, historian Max Perry Mueller illuminates Wakara’s complex and sometimes paradoxical story, revealing a man who both helped build the settler American West and defended Native sovereignty. Wakara was baptized a Mormon and allied with Mormon settlers against other tribal nations to seize large parts of modern-day Utah; yet a pan-tribal uprising against the Mormons that now bears Wakara’s name stalled and even temporarily reversed colonial expansion. Drawing together deep archival research with Native oral histories, archaeology, geology, and ecology, Wakara’s America offers an innovative new vision of the history of the American West with Native people at its center. It serves as a powerful testament to Wakara’s legacy, which endures in his story, in his tribal descendants, and in their stewardship of their ancestral lands today.

This event is being cosponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, the Center for the American West, the Department of History, the Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Office of Native American Affairs.

Off

Traditional

White

The Urdu Shiʿi Practice of Khiṭābat (oratory)

Elizabeth Williams — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:32:38 +0000

The Urdu Shiʿi Practice of Khiṭābat (oratory) Elizabeth Williams Thu, 01/22/2026 - 09:32

Join the Department of Religious Studies on February 24th for The Urdu Shiʿi Practice of Khiṭābat (oratory)

January 24th, 5-6pm
Eaton Humanities 135

On any given day in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, tens and hundreds of Urdu-speaking Shiʿa khāṭibs (orators) address audiences that have gathered to listen to them. In this talk, I draw upon twenty months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Karachi to argue that khiṭābat (oratory) is best conceptualized as "intellectual practice." By intellectual, I refer to aspects of oratory such as designating topics of oration, presenting clear arguments, and providing citations as evidence for claims. By practice, I refer to aspects of oratory such as the materiality of the ritual space, the technologies that mediate between orators and their audiences, and the relationship between what is said in an oration with where and when the oration is taking place. In attending to khiṭābat as intellectual practice, I push back against dominant scholarly tendencies that divide “popular” practice from “elite” texts, often relegating practice as secondary to doctrine or belief. Attending to khiṭābat as intellectual practice is helpful because it shifts the methodological emphasis from an abstract or a solely discursive domain of ideas to the world in which such ideas are articulated, debated, and circulated. Additionally, rethinking khiṭābat as intellectual practice is also productive because it moves the conversation on Muslim ritual practice beyond mere functionalism (intended towards specific ends, like ideological dissemination or the reification of tradition) or mere phenomenology (reducing khiṭābat to bodily techniques or individual reception).

Mohammad Nabeel Jafri holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. He is a scholar of Islam in modern South Asia, with a focus on Twelver Shiʿi practice in Pakistan. He received his PhD from the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in 2024. His dissertation, Orating Knowledge: Urdu Shiʿi Khiṭābat in Contemporary Karachi, received the 2024 S. S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies, awarded by the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include ritual practice, semiotics, authority, and language use.

Off

Traditional

White

event announcement

Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West

Off

The Urdu Shiʿi Practice of Khiṭābat (oratory)

Off