The Church 2 Mosque project (C2M) was created by Shyam K. Sriram, PhD, an assistant professor of political science at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York. A national expert on refugee resettlement and the author of the first American textbook on the topic (see Resources), Sriram was inspired to start a dialogue in 2024 on the transformation of churches to mosques when he noticed a few of them in Buffalo (including his favorite mosque - Jami Masjid Buffalo).
In collaboration with Analee DeGlopper (Canisius '25), the coauthors coined the expression "religious upcycling" (see Resources) to account for the transformation of a house of worship from one faith to another while still maintaining the architectural merits of the original structure. His current research collaborator is Olivia Schmidt, a graduate student at Brock University in Ontario.
The goal is to start a national conversation and document more religious upcycling with an invitation to the public to submit the names of other mosques that were formerly churches. We see this work meeting at the intersection of national conversations on immigration, integration, architecture, political science, religious studies, and geography.