My research interests, broadly construed, lie in the historically shifting relations between the fields of religion, science, and politics in modern Egypt. My proposed project investigates the relationship between secular knowledge practices in the public and the imaginary foundations of scientific testimony among Muslims and Coptic Christians. Troubling longstanding divisions between the political and the scientific, as well as the secular and the religious, it seeks to explore how the making of truth claims relies upon a material culture of perceiving and judging objects as true or false in nature. Such material practices of truth-making reveal the convergence of various moral and natural orders which govern Muslim-Christian difference in the public. For example, it pursues the following questions: What is the relationship between everyday practices of venerating saints and the credibility of testimony? What scientific methods do clergy and sheikhs employ for confirming miracles and how are such claims rendered publicly translatable? To what extent do Christian and Muslim habits of discerning the otherworldly stabilize objects of shared reality? To what extent do they enable the exercise of toleration or conversely, pose a threat to public order?

This project continues and deepens my previous work on images, senses, and mass media in Coptic Orthodox practices of saintly devotion. My Ph.D. thesis, entitled Technologies of Intercessory Power (UC Berkeley, 2008), is an ethnographic analysis of how the circulation of media from icons and relics to photography and film structure the visual and tactile perception of saintly presence in public spaces. My upcoming work will draw upon its emphasis upon the materiality of public religiosity and shift gears to consider the political implications of saintly and prophetic images for the making of religious difference. In this way, it broadens the empirical topic from the Coptic-specific to the Muslim-Coptic public, offering an ideal site for conceptual engagement with secular truth-making and scientific practice.