Education:

Ph.D., Brown University
M.A., Stanford University
M.Phil., University of Cambridge
B.A., Yale University

Research:

What does it mean to know? How do embodied practices, religious experiences, and social identities mark certain people as knowing beings? How do they exclude others from authoritative knowledge? Uy studies how Muslim thinkers have approached these questions to fashion themselves and the world(s) around them. He specializes in medieval Sufism and Islamic philosophy, reading theoretical texts, encyclopedias, hagiographies, and prayer manuals in conversation with contemporary approaches to knowledge and identity.

Uy's dissertation won the 2022 Malcom H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Humanities.  His first book, Lost in a Sea of Letters, explored the life and work of Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūya (d. 1252), a Mongol-era Sufi whose arcane treatises inspired generations of mystics and messiahs. Forgrounding Hamūya's deconstructive ethos and radical openness to interpretation, the book revealed how embracing plurality could thrive as a mode of social, intellectual, and spiritual competetion.   

His current project uses jazz as a framework to theorize the relationship between abstract theory, embodied practice, and improvised social performane among medieval Sufis. 

Teaching:

Dr. Uy teaches on a variety of themes in religious studies and Islamic studies. He is currently developing courses on mysticism; science, magic, and religion; gender and sexuality; and music, improvisation, and religious experience. In the classroom, Dr. Uy encourages students to put their own experiences and commitments into dialogue with course material, pushing them to develop their own self-conscious, morally satisfying, and analytically productive approaches to both academic and personal concerns.

Prior to JMU, Dr. Uy was the inaugural Mellon Teaching Fellow in Global Islamic Studies at Connecticut College.

Selected Publications:

Lost in a Sea of Letters: Sa'd al-Dīn Hamūya and the Plurality of Sufi Knowledge. Islamicate Intellectual History 14. Leiden: Brill, 2025. https://brill.com/display/title/71918. 

“Prayer, Deconstruction, and Boundless Play: Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūya’s Avant-Garde Sufism.” History of Religions 63, no. 3 (2024): 290–320. https://doi.org/10.1086/728125.

C. Uy II and W. Madelung, C. Baffioni, and N. Alshaar ed. and trans., On God and the World: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 49-51. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2019.