NEWS

'Approaching the Qur'an" author Sells to speak to UNC students, faculty, staff

CHAPEL HILL -- Dr. Michael Sells, author of "Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations," will speak Thursday (Sept. 5) at 7:30 p.m. in Hill Hall Auditorium at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited, and those planning to attend are encouraged to arrive early.

Sells' book, the focus of this year's annual summer reading program, was selected by a committee of faculty, students and staff. In the non-credit program, now in its fourth year, the university asked all new incoming students to read "Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations" and discuss their ideas in two-hour discussion groups led by trained faculty and staff volunteers on Aug. 19, the day before fall classes began.

In past years, authors or others who were subjects of the summer reading books have come to campus to speak and meet with students. The reading program was among recommendations from a faculty task force in the late 1990s to improve and enhance the intellectual climate at Carolina.

Sells is a religion professor at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he has taught for 17 years in the areas of Islam, Islam and the West, comparative religions, religion and violence, Islamic and comparative mysticism and Middle East love poetry.

Author of seven books, Sells has won Guggenheim, Fulbright and National Endowment of the Humanities fellowships, the Columbia Arabic-English Translation Prize and two American Academy of Religion Book Awards. One of the latter was for "The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia" (University of California Press, 1996), which analyzed how myth and ritual can be manipulated to justify genocide against a religious minority.

In 1993, Sells co-founded the Community of Bosnia, a non-profit organization dedicated to resisting religious persecution, racism and genocide and to working for a tolerant, multi-religious society in Bosnia and the world. He contributed to the forthcoming book, "The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy."

For more information on Sells or the event, visit http://www.unc.edu/srp/#author or e-mail read@unc.edu.

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News Services Contact: Mike McFarland, (919) 962-8593