Verena Hanna Meyer

Ph.D. Columbia University
M.Phil Columbia University
M.St. Oxford University

Verena Meyer received her PhD at the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where she is now a Early Career Fellow. Trained in Islamic Studies and specializing in Islam in Indonesia, her research focuses on the ways in which traditionalist and modernist Javanese Muslims construct and maintain their group identities through memory practices of authoritative founding figures and by appropriating canonical texts in Arabic, Indonesian, and Javanese. In addition to her ethnographic work on contemporary Islam, she has also explored themes of coherence and paradox as modes of theological articulation in classical Malay and Javanese poetry and their reception of Arabic philosophical traditions.

Meyer, V. (2021). A wali’s quest for guidance: The Islamic genealogies of the Seh Mlaya. Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia, 22(3), 675-692. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.17510/wacana.v22i3.108

Meyer, V. (2021). “Traces of the other form of life: The rural, the urban, and Indonesians’ social mobility in Candra Aditya’s Dewi pulang.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 177(2-3), p.234-242. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379-bja10031

Meyer, V. (2020). “Neo-Sufism in Indonesia: A reconsideration of Nurcholish Madjid’s development of Fazlur Rahman’s thought.” In K.P. Ewing & R. Corbett (Eds.), Sufi politics: Rethinking Islam, scholarship, and the state in South Asia and beyond. New York: Columbia University Press.

Acri, A. & Meyer, V. (Eds.). (2019). “Indic-Islamic encounters in Javanese and Malay mystical literatures.” [Special issue]. Indonesia and the Malay World, 47(139). 

Meyer, V. (2019). “Translating divinity: Punning and paradox in Hamzah Fansuri’s poetic Sufism.” Indonesia and the Malay World, 47(139), p.353-372. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2019.1654216

Meyer, V. (2016). “The people and the wayang by Franz Magnis Suseno: Translation and introduction.” International Journal of Dharma Studies, 4(3). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1186/s40613-016-0028-6