Dr. John R. Bowen

Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

John Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He studies problems of pluralism, law, and religion, and in particular contemporary efforts to rethink Islamic norms and law in Asia, Europe, and North America His most recent book on Asia is Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (Cambridge, 2003), and his Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princeton, 2007) concerned current debates in France on Islam and laïcité. Can Islam be French? (Princeton, 2009) treats Muslim debates and institutions in France (and appeared in French in 2011), and will be followed by A New Anthropology of Islam from Cambridge and Blaming Islam from MIT Press, both in 2012. He also writes regularly for The Boston Review. His current two research projects concern sharia and civil law in England, and Islamic courts and property disputes in Indonesia.