John
Bowen
John Bowen is Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of numerous books about Islam including Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space.
John Bowen
John R. Bowen has been studying Islam and society in Indonesia since the late 1970s, and since 2001 has worked in Western Europe and North America on problems of pluralism, law, and religion, and in particular on contemporary efforts to rethink Islamic norms and civil law. His latest books include the collaborative works Pragmatic Inquiry and Women and Property Rights in Indonesian Islamic Legal Contexts. On Indonesia is Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning. His Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves concerned debates in France on Islam and laïcité. Can Islam be French? treated Muslim debates and institutions in France and appeared in French in 2011.
His current project is a five-country study of Proving Halal. He also writes regularly for The Boston Review, and for media in France, Britain, and the US. Awarded a Guggenheim prize in 2012 and named a Carnegie Fellow in 2016, Professor Bowen has also served as a recurrent Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
