Dr. Matthew R. Hotham [Hoe-Thumb] is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Ball State University.
His research has two theoretically related but historically distant prongs. First, his dissertation highlighted the complexity and diversity of the Islamic tradition through the study of an important but under-researched medieval Persian text, Nizami Ganjavi’s Treasury of Mysteries. Several in-progress or already published articles and book chapters have developed out of this research.
The second prong examines Euro-American constructions of the Muslim as an “other” to be feared, focusing on how a diverse array of contemporary literatures, from television shows to internet memes, use animals and animal imagery to construct the Muslim body as different and dangerous.
In both projects, his work focuses on the body and bodily comportment, examining how what a person eats, drinks, smells, sees, and touches is used to mark the boundaries of religious identity.
Matthew R. Hotham 