Dr. Andrew M. Wender

I am an Associate Teaching Professor in the Departments of History and Political Science, and Director of the Religion, Culture and Society Program; I have taught at UVic since 2001.  I hold an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. (2006) from the University of Victoria, which I completed while a Fellow at UVic's Centre for Studies in Religion and Society (CSRS); my Ph.D. investigated how modern, secular law's tendency to transform all of reality into property in fact manifests the law's powerful religious foundation.  Prior to my Ph.D., I earned a B.A. (Honors) in History from Western Washington University, as well as a J.D. from the Seattle University School of Law, and became a member of the Washington State Bar.

My teaching – for which I received the 2011 Gilian Sherwin Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching – and research focus on the history and politics of the Middle East, especially religious dimensions; critical approaches to thinking about politics and religion within global as well as Middle East settings; and political thought, especially within comparative contexts. Other key emerging interests include historical and modern trajectories of messianic salvation, particularly in relation to empire; comparative world revolutions; and the application of quantum theory and cosmology to the social sciences and humanities. I have published in such journals as PS: Political Science & Politics, Telos, World History Bulletin, Sociology of Islam, Digest of Middle East Studies, Implicit Religion, and World History Connected.

2025 The End of the Ottoman Empire: A Short History with Documents (co-edited with Martin Bunton). Hackett Publishing Company, 2025

“Jewish Messianic Movements” and “Zoroastrian Dualism and Monotheism”. Forthcoming in Andrew Holt, ed., Religion and World Civilizations: How Faith Shaped Societies from Antiquity to the Present. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

2021    Review of Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World, by Ussama Makdisi. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019, forthcoming in World History Connected, Vol. 18, No. 3.

2021    “A Compass During the Storm: Offering Students Critical Rigor for Polarizing Times”, co-authored with Valerie J. D’Erman, PS: Political Science & Politics, 1-5 (“First View”). doi:10.1017/S1049096521000457.

2021    “Course Syllabus: Religion and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, World History Bulletin, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 25-33. 

2021    “Moving Beyond Secular-Religious Binaries: A framework for understanding the interaction between religion and politics”, chapter co-authored with Mohita Bhatia, pp. 19-43 in Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay and Mohita Bhatia, eds., Religion and Politics in Jammu and Kashmir (London and New York: Routledge). 

2021    Review of God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World, by Alan Mikhail. New York: Liveright, 2020, in World History Bulletin, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 54-55. 

2020    Review of Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750, by Noel Malcolm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, in World History Connected, Vol. 17, No. 2 [internet accessible at https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/17.2/br_wender.html]. 

2020    ““Apophatic Entanglement” and the Politics of Unknowing: Catherine Keller”, a Review of Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement, by Catherine Keller.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, in Telos 190, pp. 193-95. 

2017    “Asymmetry and the Reimagining of Political Theology”, Telosscope (Weblog of Telos Press and the journal Telos), March 8 [internet accessible at http://www.telospress.com/asymmetry-and-the-reimagining-of-political-theology/. 

2016    “The Contending Logics of Interventionism Pervading Today’s Middle East: a Telling Sign of Foreign Policy Conundrums in the Late-Modern Age.”  Pp. 15-35 in Mohammed M. Aman and Mary Jo Aman, eds., The Middle East: New Order or Disorder? (Washington, DC: Policy Studies Organization/Westphalia Press). 

2016    “Comparative Understandings of the Human Political Actor: An Entryway into the Critique of Totalizing, Modernist Monopolies over Ethics and Politics”, Telosscope (Weblog of Telos Press and the journal Telos), March 30 [internet accessible at http://www.telospress.com/comparative-understandings-of-the-human-political-actor-an-entryway-into-the-critique-of-totalizing-modernist-monopolies-over-ethics-and-politics/].   

2015    “Looking Beyond the Westphalian Nation-State: Challenging the Modernist Vision of History with Alternative Political Orders and Worldviews”, Telosscope (Weblog of Telos Press and the journal Telos), April 3 [internet accessible at http://www.telospress.com/looking-beyond-the-westphalian-nation-state/]. 

2015    Review of Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West’s Past, by John M. Owen, IV.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015; for Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online, Vol. 3, Issue 3. 

2014    “Beyond Resurgent ‘Islamists’ and Enlightened ‘Secularists’: Critiquing Caricatures of Religion in the Arab Uprisings”, Sociology of Islam special issue on ‘Contemporary Social Movements in the Middle East and Beyond’, Vol. 2, Issue 3-4, pp. 268-282. 

2014    “Re-approaching – Not Merely Reproaching – Religious Sectarianism within a Tumultuous Middle East.”  Pp. 195-207 in Mohammed M. Aman and Mary Jo Aman, eds., Middle East Conflicts & Reforms (Washington, DC: Policy Studies Organization/Westphalia Press).

2014    Review of One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States, edited by Mark LeVine and Mathias Mossberg.  Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014; for Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online, Vol. 2, Issue 11. 

2014    Review of Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics, edited by Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2014; for Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online, Vol. 2, Issue 5.   

2012    “Learning Through Upheaval: Strategies for Analyzing and Construing Emerging Socio-Political Transformations in the Middle East”, Digest of Middle East Studies (DOMES), Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 300-312. 

2011    “Transcending Nationalist Divides: Religious Reconciliation As the Basis for a One-State Solution in Israel/Palestine”, Digest of Middle East Studies (DOMES), Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 271-286. 

2009    “Helping Students See What Ordinarily Remains Hidden: How Implicit Religion Can Enrich Teaching”, Implicit Religion: Journal of the Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion and Contemporary Spirituality (CSIRCS), Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 281-294. 

2008    “Environmental Harms and Capitalist Regulation”, a Book Review of Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 130-132. 

2007    “State Power as a Vehicle for the Expression and Propagation of Implicit Religion: The Case Study of the ‘War on Terrorism’”, Implicit Religion: Journal of the Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion and Contemporary Spirituality (CSIRCS), Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 244-261.