TCNJ News
For Immediate Release
February 24, 2005
Grant to Fund Photo Exhibit Featuring Islamic Shrines
EWING, NJ .History professor at The College of New Jersey Jo-Ann Gross has been awarded a $10,000 project development grant from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in Tajikistan to fund her photographic project on Islamic shrines in Tajikistan
The grant will be used help spread her message through the exhibition of 60 photographs of the shrines of Tajikistan accompanied by historical text posters. Through this display Gross hopes "to bring visual expression to an important and dynamic aspect of Tajik culture and provide a link between local culture, social development and historical memory, past and present."
The exhibition opens at the National Museum in Dushanbe in early July. In the following three months the exhibition will travel to 11 towns in the Zerafshon Valley, Badakhshan and Kulob regions. The project will also produce a 2006 calendar poster to be distributed across the country and will ultimately culminate in the publication of a book on the Islamic shrines of Tajikistan.
Gross' project focuses on a very important aspect of Tajikistan 's culture. Pilgrimage and shrine-centered religion lay at the very heart of religiosity for Muslims in Tajikistan. Historically, Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, played a central role in the religious and communal life of Central Asian Muslims through the popularity of Sufi saints, legends and especially shrines. The spiritual and social meanings of shrines have endured in the hearts and minds of urban and rural Tajiks through the Soviet period, the Tajik Civil War and the present post-Soviet period.
The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation is associated with the Swiss Consular Agency in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and is funded by the government of Switzerland. It is dedicated to promoting awareness and the development of culture with the aim of reinforcing development and transition processes. They are committed to achieving a new synthesis between tradition and modernity in order to utilize the creation skills of people in developing countries.
About The College of New Jersey
TCNJ currently is ranked as one of the 75 "Most Competitive" schools in the nation by Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, is rated the No. 1 public institution in the northern region of the country by U.S. News & World Report, and is one of Kiplinger's Personal Finance's top educational values in the country. In 2006, the College joined an elite group of institutions when it was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Fewer than 10 percent of the nation's colleges and universities share this honor.
