Jon Zilberg (Ph.D., 1996) has a new position as an Affiliate Research Scholar in the Graduate School of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (in Jakarta, Indonesia). Jon will lecture, run research and writing workshops, work with graduate students and faculty conducting research on Islam, promote academic research in museums (including continuing his prior work with the Museum Istiqlal, which is effectively the National Islamic Museum), assist in grant writing with the campus Center for Advanced Studies, and build links with foreign institutions. He will also assist in editing university publications, as the University publishes two journals (with a third underway), and all theses produced by students at the university are published as a book and online (in Indonesian). More broadly, Jon’s intellectual mandate will be to conduct and promote long-term ethnographic research on the issue of religious pluralism and the crisis of liberalism in Indonesia. Jon joins another UIUC Dept. of Anth. alum, Moeslim Abdurrahman (Ph.D., 2000), who is also on the faculty at the university.
Jon also has another new position, teaching English in the International Baccalaureate program in Grades 6 and 7 in Jakarta. Of this position, Jon writes: “I am excited for the opportunity to put into practice interdisciplinary teaching towards the next generation of Indonesian scholars.” If you’d like to get in touch with Jon about any of these projects, his e-mail address is: jonathanzilberg@gmail.com
