Timothy Gutmann

This is the personal scholarship page for Timothy Gutmann. My PhD in religion is from the University of Chicago. I focus on Islamic and East Asian traditions.

My research and teaching also focus on intellectual and social history, epistemology and philosophy of education, the politics of belonging and the minority question, and critical theory and postcolonial thought.

Having taught at the UChicago and elsewhere, I am Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Southern Mississippi. I split my time between Hattiesburg, Mississippi and Kenwood, Chicago.

I am a scholar of Islam and East Asian traditions interested in how modernizing processes use and understand the past.

My book project is titled Demands of Progress: Universal Education in Islamic and Confucian Thought. The project examines how Muslim and Confucian reformers introduced the idea of mass education in Egypt and China in the late-19th century.

Looking at these two groups, I argue that the modern concept of public education does not naturally arise from how knowledge was understood in the past. However, mass education is not simply an exercise in the coercive power of the state but rather a conscriptionist project that endows the capabilities and understandings with which individual subjects are supposed to fashion themselves and that bind those subjects to a collective purpose. The book project takes a constructive and critical perspective on the idea of universal education, which has shaped all of our lives, through the resources of older tradition.

My published work has dealt with comparative history of education, human rights theory, the minority question, critical pedagogy, plurality and Chinese traditions, and Islam in China.

I am looking forward to conversations with academic scholars and people curious about religion, history, theory, anthropology, and area and regional studies.

This is my selected curriculum vitae.

Background Photo: Aasil K. Ahmad