Annual Report 2014/15
The 2014/15 annual report is a comprehensive report on the Centre of Islamic Studies’ activities throughout the preceding year. The annual report provides information about the Centre’s research, events, visiting academics and partner organisations activities.
Download the CIS Annual Report 2014/15.
One of the highlights of this year is the continued success of the Centre project on conversion to Islam in Britain. Narratives of Conversion to Islam in Britain: Female Perspectives has been downloaded more than 150,000 times since its publication in May 2013. As planned, the male part of this project was launched in 2014 with the intention of developing an insider perspective with the help of some 50 converts to Islam to be drawn from different backgrounds. The Centre hopes to finish this project in 2015 and to publish an extensive report on the subject in early 2016. In this context, the Centre jointly organised a oneday symposium in June 2015 on religious conversion in collaboration with the Woolf Institute in Cambridge.
Another highlight has been the convening of the second graduate symposium on Muslims in the UK and Europe. Building on the success of the first symposium, a selected group of graduate students from across the UK and Europe gathered in Cambridge to present their research to their peers and selected senior mentors. The symposium was an excellent platform to encourage research on Muslims in Europe and to suggest new research trajectories. The Centre plans to publish selected papers from this symposium in 2016, building on the success of the first set of papers that was published in May 2015 on the occasion of the second symposium.
The Centre’s Research Associate, Julian Hargreaves, completed a qualitative research study of anti-Muslim hate crime and discrimination in England and Scotland. He conducted focus groups and interviews with nearly 100 Muslim participants in seven towns and cities, and convened a symposium bringing together civil society leaders, community organisations, and researchers at Parliament and universities, to discuss emerging research and responses. The Centre will publish a report shortly.
A delegation from the Centre visited the University of Kaunas in Lithuania for a joint event under the Centre’s programme of ‘Cambridge in …’ which has taken scholars from the Centre in the past to, among other places, Bosnia and China. We hope to launch further activities under this programme in the future.