Lauren Osborne
Associate Professor of Religion, Chair
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Hunter Conservatory 304
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509-527-5809
My current research is on the recitation of the Qur'an and the possibilities for understanding meaning across the sound and experience of the text. In this research, I employ both hermeneutic and ethnographic methods, drawing on my background in religious studies and music. In both my research and my teaching, I am also interested in non-discursive meaning in religious texts and experience, mysticism (particularly its literary aesthetics), Jews and Muslims in medieval Andalusia, and music and religion.
- Religion 110 Religion & the Senses
- Religion 170 The End Times: Representations of the Apocalypse
- Religion 203 What Is Religion?
- Religion 205 American Islam
- Religion 207 Islamic Traditions
- Religion 217 The Qur'an
- Religion 236 Comparative Scriptures
- Religion 304 Muslim Bodies
- Religion/Film and Media Studies 307 Mediating Religions
- Religion/Music 310 Hearing Islam
- Religion 321 Islamic Mysticism
- Religion 448 Seminar in the Academic Study of Religion
2025, Hearing Islam: The Sounds of a Global Religious Tradition. New York: Routledge.
2024, “Qur’anic Orality and Textual Epistemologies of the Humanities,” ReOrient. 9, number 1, (2024): 114-130. https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/reorient.9.1.0114
2024, “Breath, bodies, and sacred text: Thinking about recitation with al-Ghazālī and Kūkai,” a dialogue collaboratively published with Charlotte Eubanks. postmedieval 15, issue 2 (June 2024): 373–389. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-024-00314-5
2021, “The Relationship of the Oral and the Written,” The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an, edited by Daniel Madigan, Maria Massi Dakake, and George Archer. New York: Routledge
2021, "Breath," Annual Whitman College Convocation Address
2020, "The Mediated Qur’an: Religious Education and Recitation via Online Distance Learning in the Sultanate of Oman," Yale Journal of Music and Religion 6, no. 2: 74-88. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/vol6/iss2/5/
2019 "Aural Epistemology: Hearing and Listening in the Text of the Qur'an" and volume introduction, "The Qur'an and Affect," Body and Religion 3, number 1, (2019): 71-93. https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.16810
2019 "Feeling the Words: Sayyid Qutb's Affective Engagement with the Qurʾan in Al-Taswir al-Fanni fi al-Qurʾan," Religion Compass. https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12338
2019 Edited work, Syndicate Symposium on Karen Bauer's Gender Hierarchy in the Qur'an. Syndicate Network. https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/gender-hierarchy-in-the-quran/
2016 "Textual and Paratextual Meaning in the Recited Qur'an: Analysis of a Performance of Surat al-Furqan by Sheikh Mishary bin Rashid al-Afasy." Qur'anic Studies Today, edited by Angelika Neuwirth and Michael Sells. New York: Routledge, 2016. https://www.routledge.com/Quranic-Studies-Today/Neuwirth-Sells/p/book/9781138181953
2016 "The Experience of the Recited Qur'an." Invited contribution for " Bringing Sound into Middle East Studies," a roundtable organized by Carole Woodall and Andrea Stanton. International Journal of Middle East Studies48, issue 01 (February 2016): 124-128. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002074381500152X