OSUN Faculty

Karen Barkey

Karen Barkey is the Kellogg Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Bard College. Her current work is on religion and toleration. She has written on the early centuries of Ottoman state toleration and is now exploring different ways of understanding how religious coexistence, toleration, and sharing occurred in different historical sites under Ottoman rule and the contemporary Mediterranean. Her main project is on Shared Sacred Sites which is a collaborative program that seeks to develop a rubric for the description, classification, analysis, and publication of work relating to spaces and locations used by multiple, disparate communities for religious purposes. She has also co-curated two exhibition projects on Shared Sacred Sites in Thessaloniki, Greece, and in New York City, New York. These exhibitions have produced two books: Shared Sacred Sites (co-edited with Manoël Pénicaud & Dionigi Albera; New York Public Library, CUNY Graduate Center, The Morgan Library & Museum; New York; 2018) and Shared Sacred Sites in the Balkans and the Mediterranean (also co-edited, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art; 2018). An edited book, Choreography of Sacred Spaces: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution (with Elazar Barkan), explores the history of shared religious spaces in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine/Israel, all three regions once under Ottoman rule. The project provides the historical antecedents to help us understand the accommodation and contention around specific sites in the modern period, tracing comparative areas and regime changes. Her new book with Sudipta Kaviraj and Vatsal Naresh is Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (Oxford UP, 2021). Her manuscript in progress is about Successful Religious Pluralism.