BUDDHISM: EAST ASIAN
Lecture and discussion. An introductory survey that studies East Asian Buddhism as an integral , living religious tradition. Emphasis on the reading of original treatises and historiographies in translation, while historical events are discussed in terms of their relevance to contemporary problems confronted by Buddhism. There is a mandatory weekly discussion session.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Michael Como
CULPA: 20
Info
- 4 points
BUDDHISM: EAST ASIAN-DISC
- W noon-1 p.m.
- W 1 p.m.-2 p.m.
- W 4 p.m.-5 p.m.
- W 5 p.m.-6 p.m.
- R 9 a.m.-10 a.m.
- R 10 a.m.-11 a.m.
- W 4 p.m.-5 p.m.
- W noon-1 p.m.
- F 10 a.m.-11 a.m.
- F 11 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Mehreen Z Jiwan
Info - 0 points
CHINESE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS
This course provides a chronological and thematic introduction to Chinese religions from their beginnings until modern times. It examines distinctive concepts, practices and institutions in the religions of China. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity and unity of religious expressions in China, with readings drawn from a wide-range of texts: religious scriptures, philosophical texts, popular literature and modern historical and ethnographic studies. Special attention will be given to those forms of religion common to both “elite” and “folk” culture: cosmology, family and communal rituals, afterlife, morality and mythology. The course also raises more general questions concerning gender, class, political patronage, and differing concepts of religion.
- MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Ruifeng Chen
Info - 4 points
Chinese Religious Traditions - Discussio
Chinese Religious Trad -
This course provides a chronological and thematic introduction to Chinese religions from their beginnings until modern times. It examines distinctive concepts, practices and institutions in the religions of China. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity and unity of religious expressions in China, with readings drawn from a wide-range of texts: religious scriptures, philosophical texts, popular literature and modern historical and ethnographic studies. Special attention will be given to those forms of religion common to both “elite” and “folk” culture: cosmology, family and communal rituals, afterlife, morality and mythology. The course also raises more general questions concerning gender, class, political patronage, and differing concepts of religion.
- W 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
- W 5:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Saila Sri Kambhatla
Info - 0 points
MAGIC AND MODERNITY
This course introduces students to the cultural history of magic: as an idea, as a practice, and as a tool with which wield power and induce wonder. Magic, as we will explore, is a modern concept, the contours of which have been shaped by its relations with religion and science, always against larger backdrops—of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, (post) colonialism, and (post) secularism. Readings are drawn from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, sociology, drama, literature, history, history of science, and political theory. Cases and readings focus on everything from medieval England to post-socialist Mozambique. Throughout the term, a recurring theme will be whether, and to what extent, magic is incompatible with modernity—or, actually, integral to its constitution.
By the end of this course, students should be familiar with a variety of ways in which magic has been understood since the early modern era, in a wide range of settings and cultural contexts. By tracing understandings of magic, students should also come away with an appreciation of how the authority of being “modern” is constructed (and contested) in relation to contemporary valuations of reason, science, enchantment, and the imagination.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Matthew Engelke
CULPA: 3 Wikipedia h-index: 25 Info - 3 points
Science Saves
Some of the most significant and influential imaginings about the future have come out of religious movements. Today the scales of authoritative power to inform us about our collective futures seem to have shifted, many would say properly so, in favor of the sciences. Promises about the future, however, are never just predictions which may or may not come to pass. They are claims to power and authority (who has the power to describe and create the future), expressions of values (what kinds of dispositions, attitudes, and behaviors are considered proper in this future), and producers of future social worlds (who is permitted to participate in this future). Whether or not science discourses are attuned to it, the sciences have learned a lot from religion when it comes to selling salvation. Therefore, we do well to study the various intersections of science, technology, society, and religion. In this course, we will examine the utopian claims of science and technology, both past and present, to explore and understand how that authority is produced and structured, the kinds of values encoded within these claims, and the people, things, entities, and institutions who are included in or excluded from these potential futures. This course specifically aims to equip students with the ability to discern claims about the future, understand what is lurking between the lines, critically examine its consequences and intentions, and contextualize such claims about the future within alternative or competing claims, all in the hope that such critical attention produces visions of the future, and assemblages of science and technology, which are more democratic, just, and equitable.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Connor J Martini
Info - 4 points
THEORY
An exploration of alternative theoretical approaches to the study of religion as well as other areas of humanistic inquiry. The methods considered include: sociology, anthropology, philosophy, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, genealogy, and deconstruction. (Previous title: Juniors Colloquium)
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Courtney Bender
CULPA: 10
Info
- 4 points
Muslims in the West
Contemporary Western Muslims around the world face a number of challenges today. What are some of the major issues that some Western Muslim communities are negotiating? What can we learn from particular narratives of Muslims in the West, including during slavery in the US and at the turn of the twentieth century? How did Islam spread among African Americans in the mid-twentieth century and what does contemporary Muslim American thought look like today? How do the histories, beliefs and practices vary among contemporary diasporic Muslims especially in relationship to their circumstances and their negotiations of questions relating to race, class, and gender? What do some of the major divisions in theology and politics look like among contemporary Muslims along conservative and progressive lines? Who are some of the major voices and movements contesting for authority today and what positions do they take? This course aims to explore these questions and more through close readings and discussions of primary sources coupled with secondary academic works.
- M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Ebad Rahman
Info - 3 points
Queer Theory, Religion, and Their Discon
QUEER THEORY AND RELIGION
For the most part queer studies and religious studies have met each other with great suspicion and little interest in the conceptual resources of the respectively other field. Our guiding questions will be: What does religion have to do with queerness? What does queerness have to do with religion?
Queer theory and activists, unless they already identify as religious, often have little or little good to say about religion. Conversely, many religious traditions intensively regulate gender, sex, sexuality, and especially queerness. this course will explore how religious studies can enrich queer theory and how queer theory can reshape our thinking about religious studies. But beyond the mutual disinterest, anxieties, and animosities, queer studies and religious studies share actually a whole range of core interests and questions, such as embodiment, sexuality, gender-variability, coloniality, race appearing as religious identity and religious identity as gendered, as well as the role of catastrophe, utopia, and redemption in our experience of the world.
We will examine questions about religion come to the fore when we paying especially attention to queerness, gender, sexuality, pleasure, pain, and desire. Equally, we will examine how queer discourses mobilize religious and theological images and ideas, especially where these images and ideas are no longer clearly recognizable as having religious origins.
Rather than trying to settle on definitive answers, this course will cultivate a process of open-ended collective inquiry in which students will be encouraged to think autonomously and challenge facile solutions. Students should come away from the course with an expanded sense of how we grapple with issues related to gender, sexuality, desire, and embodiment in our everyday lives and how religion and religious formations are entangled with these issues well beyond religious communities. Ideally, students should experience this course as enlarging the set of critical tools at their hands for creative and rigorous thinking.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Yannik Thiem
h-index: 1 Info - 3 points
American Religions in extremis
This seminar focuses on historical, sociological, and first-hand accounts of a diverse set of American non-conformist religious and spiritual groups (including MOVE, the Branch Davidians at Waco, Father Divine's International Peace Mission, the Oneida Perfectionists, and Occupy and others). Diverse in their historical origins, their activities, and their ends, each of the groups sought or seeks to offer radically news ways of living, subverting American gender, sexuality, racial, or economic norms. The title of this seminar highlights the ways that these groups explain their reasons for existing (to themselves or others) not as a choice but as a response to a system or society out of whack, at odds with the plans of the divine, or at odds with nature and survival. Likewise, it considers the numerous ways that these same groups have often found themselves the targets of state surveillance and violence.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Courtney Bender
CULPA: 10
Info
- 4 points
Dreams
This seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students investigates the significance of dreams in multiple cultural and historical contexts with a focus on Tibetan Buddhism. Dreams and dreaming are vital aspects of Tibetan Buddhist meditative practice, visionary experience, poetry, narratives, as well as visual arts. Students in the seminar will explore a range of materials that 1) guide Buddhist practitioners to cultivate certain types of dreams, and 2) narrate dream experiences that the dreamer has deemed worth recording, and 3) situate Tibetan Buddhist examples in broader contexts of religious and psychological perspectives, with an emphasis on Freud and Jung’s treatment of dreams. According to Buddhist sources, a dream might be significant because the dreamer understands it to be revelatory, foretelling the future, or it might be recorded simply because the dreamer finds the dream in some way compelling, troubling, or funny. In life writing, dreams often highlight crucial moments in the writer’s life experience. Just as psychoanalysts make use of dreams to engage with analysands, Tibetan medical texts instruct doctors to pay close attention to patients’ dreams in the process of diagnosis. Tibetan ritual texts guide meditators in techniques for lucid dreaming. Visionary dreams are recorded in great aesthetic detail. Narratives of dreams and dreamscapes are an important part of biographies and life writing in general. We will also consider European and American treatments of dreams and lucid dreaming, including psychoanalytic, philosophical approaches to dreaming. A significant element of the course is a daily dream journal.
- M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Dominique Townsend
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
INTERPRETING BUDDHIST YOGA
Students and scholars approaching a vast amount of primary and secondary literature, as well as accounts and anthropological and sociological studies of Buddhism as a lived religion, are faced with an array of stories, data, theories and practices, many of which appear to be inconsistent with others. We try to make sense of these by interpreting them.
The art or science of interpretation – “hermeneutics” after Hermes – has a long history in Asia and in the West. Buddhism itself has a tradition of hermeneutics, as does each of the Western religious traditions and Western philosophy and law, starting with Plato and Aristotle, becoming “romantic” with Schleiermacher, and “modern” with Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Today’s Western hermeneutics has become largely de-regionalized from specific subject areas, and has been extended to the interpretation of all human experience.
After a grounding in traditional Buddhist and Western hermeneutic principles, we will focus on a number of aspects of Buddhism, including the central question of whether there is a “self” or not, and on esoteric Buddhist yoga, Tantra, central to several of the better-known forms of Buddhism today, including Tibetan Buddhism. Here we will witness the confluence and, sometimes, collision of traditional Buddhist and Tantric hermeneutics focusing in large part on “spiritual” concerns, and the Western tradition, with its emphasis on economics, power, and gender. In thinking about which interpretations are “right” -- indeed, whether any interpretation can be “right,” and, if so, "how much?" -- we will consider the cultures in which these scriptures and practices originated, as well as ourselves and our own contemporary perspectives, insights, presuppositions and prejudices.
A primary concern of hermeneutics is the interpretation of so-called "objective" physical and subjective mental realities. In thinking about the hermeneutics of outer and inner time and space, towards the end of the semester we will consider whether the "objective" and the "subjective" intersect, how much, and look at some descriptions of quantum mechanics and the role of observation of physical reality there, and analogize and contrast those to and with some Buddhist systems of philosophy and practice.
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
David R Kittay
CULPA: 6
Info
- 4 points
A Political Introduction to the Christia
Pol Intro Christian Scrip
In this course we will examine the New Testament canon and the twenty-seven texts that comprise it in light of their respective literary genres, their Jewish antecedents and Greco-Roman influences, which will include their historical, social, cultural, political and economic contexts, and the ways these factors impinged upon their various dimensions of meaning. Various modes of biblical interpretation, both ancient and contemporary, will be explored. A major emphasis will be on the ways select texts are utilized, misconstrued and weaponized in the public sphere in this contemporary moment.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Obery Hendricks
Wikipedia Info - 4 points
Islam in the Soviet Union and Successor
This seminar is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students seeking to develop an understanding of Islam in the Soviet Union and its successor states. The Soviet experience drastically altered the ways Central Asian Muslims practice Islam. This course explores the various ways in which Central Asian Muslims practiced Islam during the Soviet era and the lasting impacts of that period on contemporary Central Asia. Topics covered include the Soviet campaign against Islam, Soviet Islamic authorities, the growth of international Islamic networks in post-Soviet Central Asia, emerging Islamic movements, and common Islamic practices like pilgrimage and Islamic healing. Additionally, we will read theoretical and topical articles on comparable Islamic practices in various regions of the Muslim world to provide a broader perspective on Central Asia.
All of the readings for this course will be in English. Prior course work related to Islam or the Soviet Union is recommended, but not required.
- T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
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Instructor:
Aziza Shanazarova
Info - 4 points
Climate, Religion and Colonialism
Climate, Religion, Coloni
This course examines intersections between religion and climate through the lens of
colonialism. In recent years, scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences
have suggested that the climate crisis dates to the advent of European colonialism in the 16th and
17th centuries. This literature argues that colonial projects involved the remaking of landscapes via
“terraforming,” seeking to inscribe European imaginaries on the land and extract value from it,
while violently suppressing and destroying local and Indigenous lifeworlds. At the same time, a
longstanding body of literature has investigated the relationship between colonialism and religion,
focusing on missionary efforts to remake religious subjects and subjectivities and draw boundaries
between true religion and its opposites, “paganism” and “superstition.” This course seeks to
understand these two processes within the same frame, examining how colonial projects entailed
simultaneous efforts to subjugate, extract value from, and transform people and landscapes. By the
end of the semester, students will have deepened and nuanced their understandings of climate,
religion, and colonialism, and come away with new ways of thinking about the climate crisis.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Raffaella Taylor-Seymour
Info - 4 points
Women and Islam
This course is a comprehensive engagement with Islamic perspectives on women with a specific focus on the debates about woman’s role and status in Muslim societies. Students will learn how historical, religious, socio-economic and political factors influence the lives and experiences of Muslim women. A variety of source materials (the foundational texts of Islam, historical and ethnographic accounts, women’s and gender studies scholarship) will serve as the framework for lectures. Students will be introduced to women’s religious lives and a variety of women’s issues as they are reported and represented in the works written by women themselves and scholars chronicling women’s religious experiences.
We will begin with an overview of the history and context of the emergence of Islam from a gendered perspective. We will explore differing interpretations of the core Islamic texts concerning women, and the relationship between men and women: who speaks about and for women in Islam? In the second part of the course we will discuss women’s religious experiences in different parts of the Muslim world. Students will examine the interrelationship between women and religion with special emphasis on the ways in which the practices of religion in women’s daily lives impact contemporary societies.
All readings will be in English. Prior course work in Islam or women’s studies is recommended, but not required.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Aziza Shanazarova
Info - 4 points
Religion and Media
This is a course designed for students interested in media and their connections to religious traditions and practices. This includes a consideration of specific mediums, including print, photography, radio, television, film, and the internet. But there is also an important manner in which media technologies have to be understood in relation to the more elementary senses they express (hearing, sight, etc). We therefore investigate media as both a broad conceptual category and as specific technologies of communication. So lots on books, TV, phones and the like, but also presence, auras, connection, distance, broadcasting, and immediacy.
Course texts will include a combination of conceptual works as well as case studies drawn from major religious traditions. The learning goals of the course are: (1) to introduce seminal interpretive and methodological issues in the contemporary study of media/mediation; (2) to study some theoretical classics in the fields of media studies and religious studies, to provide a foundation for further reading; (3) to introduce new writing in the field; and (4) to encourage students to think of ways in which the issues and authors surveyed might provide models for their own interests and research. This course is geared toward graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. Some background in religious studies and/or media studies is helpful but not required.
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Matthew Engelke
CULPA: 3 Wikipedia h-index: 25 Info - 4 points
Proseminar in Religion I
The Proseminar in Religion is designed to support PhD students within the department as they work on various aspects of professional development. Meeting three times per semester, the sessions will focus on both academic and non-academic career paths, coordinated by a member of the faculty and with guest speakers from both within and beyond the department. The emphasis will be on concrete outputs and skills training. The proseminar will require preparation and active participation from enrolled students, including background reading and writing assignments connected to the monthly topic. After each session focused on a piece of writing (fellowship applications; CVs and cover letters; publishing), students should come away from the proseminar with strong drafts of the relevant texts.
The proseminar is required for all ABD students in year 5 or 6 and can be taken sequentially or not. ABD students are encouraged to speak about the timing of enrollment with the DGS and their dissertation sponsor.
- W 7 p.m.-9 p.m.
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Instructor:
Matthew Engelke
CULPA: 3 Wikipedia h-index: 25 Info - 1 points
THEORY & METHOD-STUDY OF RELIG
“Theories and Methods” courses in any field are commonly unwieldy beasts. They cannot but be a compromise-formation between contemporary questions and texts, ideas, and definitions (alongside a whole lot of problems) that we have inherited as “canonical” in a field. In the best case, such a course is a passageway into deeper engagement with a field, its histories, its complexities, and its possibilities from which we might wrest and build viable futures. Disciplinary fields are structures where power and knowledge are produced and reproduced. The study of religion is no exception. The questions of “how is ‘religion’ constructed as a category here?” and “what work does the designation of something or someone as ‘religious’ do?” will, therefore, accompany us throughout our work over the course of this semester. We will also examine how different methodological commitments shape what objects of study and which questions come to the fore for the study of religion. This course will explore how the study of religion is not reducible to the study of traditions and communities that are readily recognized as “religious.” However, the vexed histories of the construction of “religion” as a category of knowledge production does also not negate that there are large, varied, and flourishing communities of practice beyond the university for whom whether or not “religion” exists is not at all a question. Holding these layers of complexity in play, this course seeks to introduce students exemplarily to key texts and concepts that have shaped the study of religion as we encounter it today as an academic discipline.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Yannik Thiem
h-index: 1 Info - 3 points
RESEARCH IN RELIGION I
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Guided individual research.
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Instructor:
Gil Anidjar
CULPA: 22 Info -
Instructor:
Courtney Bender
CULPA: 10
Info
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Instructor:
Michael Como
CULPA: 20
Info
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Instructor:
Matthew Engelke
CULPA: 3 Wikipedia h-index: 25 Info -
Instructor:
Yannik Thiem
h-index: 1 Info -
Instructor:
Zhaohua Yang
Info -
Instructor:
Timothy Vasko
CULPA: 3
Info
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Instructor:
Dominique Townsend
CULPA: 1 Info -
Instructor:
Najam I Haider
CULPA: 8
Info
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Instructor:
Beth A Berkowitz
CULPA: 2 h-index: 6 Info - 1-6 points