This project centers religious dialogue as a pivotal component of the path to peace by exploring the affinities of Jewish, Christian and Muslim conceptualizations of exile. Below are a sampling of projects undertaken by our research team.
Exile and Return in the Digital Age: An Abrahamic Critique of Transhumanism
Elle Balle, Duke University
The Abrahamic religions offer a powerful critique of transhumanism and its vision of limitless human advancement. By seeking to overcome human limitations through technology, transhumanism creates a permanent exile of the self by severing the possibility of return. Religious concepts of journeys such as Dunya, pilgrimage, and Aliyah emphasize the importance of homecoming and the intention to return to the origin with newfound growth, an idea at odds with the transhumanist pursuit of transformation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflects this tension as the Jewish return to Israel coexists with Palestinian displacement, showing that exile goes beyond the physical and is tied to identity, memory, and the longing for return.
“But I belong to Muslim Europe”: Spain as a realm of Jewish-Muslim longings (and Belongings) in contemporary Hebrew poetry
Reut Israela Ben-Yaakov, Ph.D., Duke University
My project explores how several Hebrew poets invoke the idea of convivencia as a poetic device, which serves to unsettle dominant models of belonging. By engaging with narratives of diaspora and exile and constructing a shared, inter-religious—if mythical—connection to Spain/Sepharad, these poets critique both the nationalist-Zionist framework and the traditional Jewish notion of textual dwelling, proposing alternative modes of affiliation and the potential for unlearning established paradigms.
Exile and Return at the End of Humanism: Martin Buber and Romano Guardini in Weimar Germany
Peter Casarella, Ph.D., Duke University
The extreme nationalisms that can be found on the globe are fueled by historical memories and religious trajectories that have roots in the interwar period of the early twentieth century. On the occasion of our visit to the Katholische Akademie in Berlin in July, 2025, I will explore the connections between religion and nationalism that developed in Germany from 1923-1938, principally in the Weimar Republic that preceded Hitler’s rise to power. In other words, I am interested in how academics understand their task vis-à-vis society not just when a dictatorship has taken over power but in the infancy of dictatorship. I will focus on the philosophical concept of dialogue in this period in the writings of the Jewish thinker Martin Buber and the Catholic thinker Romano Guardini.
The Silent, the Invisible, and the Incommensurable after 1945: Materiality of Catastrophe and Exile in Barbara Honigmann’s Writings
Thekla Funke, University of Leipzig
In my project, I will explore how the German writing Jewish author Barbara Honigmann address the search for a response in the aftermath of catastrophe, focusing on how material objects can express what is often left unsaid, the absence that is still felt, and the text itself. I aim to examine how Honigmann’s writing offers a way to understand exile and return within the context of Jewish material culture after 1945. My research will also look at how material culture shapes the collective memory of the Holocaust.
Legal Pluralism in the Puritan Diaspora and Revolution
Polly Ha, Ph.D., Duke University
My research explores the layered traditions that informed the reconceptualization of consent within puritan dissent ranging from neo-Roman ideas about freedom as a status, the Hebrew law of equity, and a New Testament hermeneutic of love as an interpreter of the law. I argue for the need to recover more elastic, expansive, and historically pluralistic conceptions of consent. Puritan exile helped to fuse English common law with neo-Roman views of liberty alongside Hebrew and New Testament exegesis to expand the conditions of consent, maximize its equity, and expand its universality to apply to more inclusively to women.
Diaspora and Hurban/Nakba: Jews and Palestinians
Malachi Hacohen, Ph.D, Duke University
Notwithstanding their vast power difference, Israelis and Palestinians resemble each other. Both constitute global diasporas, each with a community in Israel/Palestine, each conceiving of itself as having been or as presently in exile and dreaming of a return, each envisioning its mirror image community as the enemy who has brought its Ḥurban or nakba. As political endeavors to reach peace have failed, the Bass Project Diaspora, Exile, and Interreligious Dialogue retrieves Jewish, Christian, and Muslim discourses, which have been interacting over two millennia, to create possibilities for coexistence. We have found the religious dialogue much easier than the national one. My own project explores the Jewish future in the aftermath of the possible collapse of the state of Israel, endeavoring to pave a new path after the oncoming Hurban.
Yearning for Peace among Abraham’s Sons: Scrutinizing convivencia in the modern genre of Andalusian mythos
Yaz Mendez Nuñez, Duke University
This paper concerns itself with the modern Western impulse towards Andalusia as a site of cultural inheritance, and the possibilities of that impulse for interfaith dialogue via textual interpretation. I argue that Western encounters with Andalusia’s memory can be understood as an attempt to use a hermeneutics of history to dream beyond the impossibility of war between the religious Self and the religious Other. I advocate for a hermeneutic approach to contemporary cultural investigations of Andalusia in the West, one which recasts the cultural project of the andalucista as yielding opportunities for self-reflection to those who dream of convivencia.
Vertical Exile from Augustine’s City of God in Modern Contexts
Allen Ryu, Duke University
This paper looks into Augustine’s framework of two cities, the City of Man and the City of God, essentially describing the “citizenship” of people as where they belong according to whether they find greater pleasure in God or in the world. This framework is used to describe the vertical exile experienced by Christians, how the Jews fit into the two cities, and whether Vance’s belief of ordo amoris is accurate to Augustine. This is done in order to find an answer to whether vertical exile “swallows” up horizontal exile.
The Latent and the Blatant: Reading Modern Jewish Theory at a Time of Genocidal Violence
Avital Schkolnik, Duke University
This essay asks, how do we conceive of one people with a tortured past of Holocaust and persecution committing violence and annihilation upon another? This question assumes compulsions such as solidarity with another’s suffering and a desire to prevent pain from another, elicited by one’s own memories of suffering. I turn to one lecture and responsive lecture between Edward Said and Jaqueline Rose, and to two written exchanges between Gershom Shcolem and Hannah Arendt, and then between Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin, with this inquiry. The responses in all of these cases are deeply disillusioned about the coexistence of Jewish sovereignty with an empathy for the stranger, the existence of love and beauty in the context of the nation, and with the place of solidarity in any political formation. Diaspora and exile are at the very root of both the question and the answer in this essay. They are what made the founding of the state of Israel a “return” for Jews, and, I argue, provide a collective mindset by which the sovereign nation perceives itself as being in a continuous state of exile and vulnerability while it flogs another nation whose story of exile and return is, de-facto, not recognized by the world.
Writing Refugee Lives
Sena Taha, Ibn Haldun University
I examine Syrian stories by and about refugees, women and men who struggle to redefine home in host countries that may welcome or reject them. Syrians constitute the highest numbers of refugees around the world and dozens of them have published stories that narrate their experiences, yet these literary writings remain unnoticed. These works are not the well-known diaspora, exile, or migrant literature, but constitute a distinctive genre of refugee literature. Using Derrida’s hostipitality theory, I look at refugees as actors of a dual relationship of host and guest. Once they cross the borders, refugees become guests of host countries. While they search for a new home, they enter spaces already rooted and filled with homes of the host people. They question what is happening between the opposites: hospitality/ hostility, familiar/ foreign, home/ host country which I analyze through miriam cooke’s theory of the Quranic term barzakh that refers to the metaphysical space between life and the hereafter and the physical space between sweet and salt waters around the Arabian Gulf. As they make sense of their space and time, refugees become active agents, fighting a battle of opposites. With the impossibility of fully returning home, refugees keep re-balancing opposites. They keep remembering, re-imagining their surroundings, and re-creating their home.
The Making of Shah Wali Allah’s Caliphal Cosmopolis
Muhammad Usama, Duke University
As part of the Exile, Diaspora, and Interreligious Dialogue team, I contributed the perspectives on exile and diasporic existence from the Islamic tradition. I am currently working on a paper on the Mughal Intellectual, Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762) of Delhi’s response to the fracturing of Mughal Imperial authority. Shah Wali Allah’s image of himself as an Indian of Arab descent in exile amongst people of other religions provides the intellectual resources for diasporic existence in the waning of sovereign authority and absence of spiritual proximity to Hejaz.
Biblical Depictions of Land and Israelite Identity
Allison Wattenbarger, Duke University
My dissertation examines the biblical depiction of the relationships between God, the Israelites, and geographical territory. Tradition often depicts the Israelites as a people who are only at home once settled in their own territory of the Promised Land. I suggest that this emphasis on geography and possession is misplaced. The biblical narrative instead emphasizes that–like all people–the Israelites live under the rule and care of God, the divine landowner. The Israelites live in God’s land alongside God’s tabernacle and then God’s temple, recalling but not quite recreating the idyllic companionship that the first people had with God in the Garden of Eden. I argue that, rather than promoting an imminent geographical return to that land, the Bible anticipates the return of all peoples to God’s home.
Linguistic Borders and the Nation-State: The use of language as a colonial, nationalist instrument via the cultural dispossession of the exiled
Leila Zak, Duke University
This paper will explore language as a colonial device which perpetuates both the idea and practices of the nation-state, particularly in the US-Mexico Borderlands, Chinese Autonomous and Special Administrative Regions, and Historic Palestine. By severing excluded communities from their language through the exclusive and fortified use of a primary state-sanctioned language in the public sector, dominant states seek to forcibly assimilate these populations by depriving them of the ability to occupy and celebrate their own national background. The concepts of language as a form of non-physical border, and discursive control via language that is meant to dehumanize, will too be scrutinized.
